Gathering Blue is the companion novel to The Giver and second in Lois Lowry’s trilogy. (The third book is Messenger, which I plan to read in 2009.) I’m not actually sure why this is considered a companion novel beyond the fact that the two are dystopian and they may or may not link together in the third book. Other than that, these two have no similarities.

In this dystopian (or more accurately post-apocalyptic) novel, society consists of people with very primitive knowledge. They are poor and live in hut-like dwellings, without running water for most of them, electricity, or pretty much technology of any kind. They are an almost stereotypical hunter/gatherer society, except not nomadic. The women are inferior to men (they aren’t allowed to read, for example), the men fight for hunting rights, and the children are beaten by their parents. The weak – deformed, injured, etc – are left for dead in a nearby field. One mother, however, fights for her child. Kira is born fatherless and with a twisted leg. By the rules of society, she should be left for dead, but her mother and grandfather convince the Council to let her stay. She becomes a weaver’s helper because of her strong hands, and later, when her mother dies, she is taken under the Council’s wing in order to thread for the Singer’s robe. The Singer holds all of the world’s history, and once a year, at a ceremony called The Gathering, the entire village listens to him recount the historical song, which he remembers by use of a detailed carved staff and an embroidered robe.

As usually happens in dystopian novels, layers are peeled away as the story goes along until the dark undersides become apparent to the reader. While this book has less of that perfect/imperfect feel (since it’s more post-apocalyptic than dystopian), it does still have a certain amount of dystopian elements, and by the end, the reader is left pretty creeped out. It was well done. Lois Lowry, as usual, proves that she’s a brilliant writer.

Only two parts of the book irritated me. First, the ending was very abrupt. I turned the last page, thinking there’d be another chapter or two, and found out that reader’s guides and interviews populated those last 15-20 pages. The book ended with a lot of unanswered questions, just like The Giver, and I hope some of those things are resolved in the third installment. Second, the poorest of the poor in this book, who live in a place called Fen, are given a dialect that sounds, to my admittedly unstudied ear, like old slave/post-slave dialect. This made me quite uncomfortable. There is no mention of race – in fact, one of these Fen children are called “pink-faced” at one point – so I don’t think the poorest of the poor are in their situation because of race. The implications still made me uncomfortable, however.

Overall, though, this was a decent book. I do hope the unresolved issues in both the first two books get resolved in the third. There is so much stuffed into these books, that they are bursting with more than they can hold. I want to feel satisfied at the ending of the third.