During our book club meeting about The Giver, I was reminded that Lois Lowry wrote a semi-sequel (not the same characters, but set in the same world) called Gathering Blue—and that I had read it years ago, although I remembered it even less than The Giver. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to revisit it if a group member hadn’t mentioned the unknown-to-me existence of a third book, Messenger, which ties the first two together. I instantly got curious about that, so I decided I’d might as well refresh my memory on Gathering Blue first.
Gathering Blue is sort of like the B-side of The Giver. It’s similar in that a young person is set apart from their community, comes to learn some harsh truths about that society, and ultimately takes action to try to change it, but in this case, the protagonist is a girl (Kira, who was born with a twisted leg, is an orphan, and has a special—perhaps magical—talent for embroidery), the community is primitive and aggressive (the weak and disabled are left to die in a field, a fate Kira escapes only because of her talent), and in the end (spoiler, but not really) she makes the opposite choice that Jonas did in The Giver. Overall it’s a fine dystopia with some interesting exploration of the place of the artist in society and a few tantalizing details that expand on the first book, but it just didn’t grab me the way The Giver did—it feels a bit more forced, less fresh, with lower stakes. I could take or leave it on its own, but if there’s a big payoff in Messenger I may revise my opinion.
No comments:
Post a Comment