Not What You Expected

**Note: This is part of the "series-ously" posts and therefore contains spoilers.  If you haven't read The Giver, stop reading now**

Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue is technically a companion to The Giver, not a sequel.  This is important because The Giver ends in a cliffhanger.  (Side note-I can't wait to see how my students react to that ending!!).  So when you first pick up Gathering Blue you are sooo anxious to see what happened to Jonas and baby Gabriel and instead of finding out what happened to them you are all of the sudden thrust into a totally different world.

Or is it totally different....

Kira is gifted at embroidery.  Her mother taught her some of the basics but Kira is able to go well beyond what her mother has taught her.  She just has the skill in her fingers.  But even with all of her skill she still doesn't have the color blue.

Yup you got it.  Gathering blue is literal.  Somehow Kira's village have lost the plants that make blue so she is unable to dye any threads blue.  She is able to make dyes for all the other colors, but not for blue.

The characters are different, the community is different but some features are the same.  If you haven't read this book yet read it and see if you can spot these things:
The knowledge of the past is kept with one person..  There is little personal freedom.  There are noticeable changes to mark the passage of time.  The speech and names of objects are just slightly different than our own.  That's what makes Lowry's societies so intriguing.  They are so close to what we have and yet they are so different.

Gathering Blue is worthy to be a companion of The Giver.  As you may remember The Giver is my favorite book of all time so to call Gathering Blue worthy is high praise indeed.  It is a compelling read and Kira has all the depth and relateablity of Jonas.  But Jonas is nowhere to be seen in this novel.

Or is he.... (I really really want to tell you what it is...it's one little line buried in the book...but to tell you would be a huge spoiler so alas I must hold my tongue).

Perseverance...that's kids stuff