Gathering Blue

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Summary: Gathering blue
Review: Hi, I am a 9th grade student who read this book for class. Overall this was not a hard book to read and it was also very interesting, so if you are also a student and have to read this book, don't be too upset. I have also read the companion book to this, "The Giver." In my mind throughout the story i was compairing the two. I saw many things on how these books contrast. In "The Giver" there is a male protagonist, in "Gathering Blue," a female. Also, in "The Giver" the world is full of technology and is very advanced, in "Gathering blue," there is very little technology and is not how the world is today.
In the story the main Kira's(the main charactor) mother dies. In their village her mother had been a seamstress and had started to teach her daughter her skill before she dies. Some women in the village want to send Kira out because they feel that she is useless because she has a bad leg. The situation is presented to the council of guardians. The guardians decide to give her the job of fixing the singer's robe.
It is a good book, I do recommend this book if you are looking for something to read over the summer. It is something that you can read fast and easily and have a good time reading it. If you have read "The giver" or even if you haven't you will enjoy this book.

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Summary: Gathering Blue
Review: Kira is a young girl about twelve or thirteen who has just lost her mother to illness and many years ago lost her father to a hunting accident where he was taken by beast. This now orphan is faced with the difficult challange as where to live because one of the women that live near her Verona tries to take her cott to make a fenced in area for her tykes and chickens. This matter is take in front of the Council of Guardians. The Council decides to give her cott to Verona and keep Kira because of her wonderful skill in threading to restore the robe worn by singer who sings the most important song that tells of the events of the history of the people. Along the way she realizes that there are secrets that the world around her is hidding and she trys to look for them.

She gets help along the way from her friends Thomas the Carver, Matt, and Branch.

Lois Lowry is a master at creating new worlds in which the characters live in. This world in which Kira lives in is very different than the world we live in today, it mostly resembles older times where people do not yet know about showers and hunting is one of there main sources of food.

This book as a whole was excellent, but the end of the book was not very good. It left the reader with many questions in which were not answered at the end.

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Summary: Gathering Blue
Review: "Gathering Blue" written in 3rd person by Lois Lowry is the companion to "The Giver." Gathering Blue takes place in a futuristic village with little technology. The people's lives revolve around working and keeping their social status.
The main character, Kira, was born with a twisted leg, a cripple. With her father taken by the beasts before she was born and her mother taken by a quick illness, she becomes an orphan. With no one left to take care of this girl, Kira must quickly become independent. Having not been able to work as others do in the village she is taken on trial for her worth since normally the weak aren't spared. By the end of the trial the Council of Guardians, the most important government heads, find her skills in sewing and she herself becomes an important figure in the village's government. She now gets to sew the robe for the "Ruin Song." The robe represents the villages past with its burnings and rebuildings. Now Kira gets to sew the future. Her comrades, Matt (one of the lower working class children) and Thomas (an important government carver) help her through tough times in her life and even help her find the mystical color of blue.
Lowry depicts Kira as a strong and unique girl, she is my favorite character. Her life alone keeps the readers interested in her fate throughout the book. I found myself eager to read on just to see what happens next. Kira, however, makes me think of how lucky we are and how many other problems we could have. Kira becomes someone to look up to and admire. I really think no that "pain makes her stronger."

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Summary: Gathering Blue
Review: The book Gathering Blue, written by Lois Lowry, is a great book. The book is based on the story of a girl named Kira. Kira lost her mother to a horrible disease and is now facing the challenge of rebuilding her life. This wonderful plot keeps you hooked the whole time. Following her mother's death Kira is taken to the Council of Guardians to face her fate. Keeping in mind that she could be put to death at any point, the Council of Guardians has something else in store for her. Kira is appointed to be the new seamstress for the singer's robe. She will repair tears, and replace the old threads of the most important robe in the community. As the book moves along Kira starts to realize the pain the community has had to endure in its past. Through out this book we experience two settings, Kira's community and the future.

The reason for this particular title is explained in the story. Through-out this book Kira is working with flowers trying to make different colors for the singer's robe. This is also a very familiar symbol through out the whole book. The only color Kira is not able to make is blue, as no one else is able to make this color either. Later on in the book Kira makes friends with an old blind man. He plays a special role in this book because he is brought into this plot wearing a bright blue shirt. This is not the only thing that is special about Kira's new friend. Kira learns many new things from this man and he eventually earns a very special place in Kira's heart. One extraordinary thing her new friend teaches her is how to make the color blue.

I had a great time reading this book and I would recommend to many people. I would recommend this book to more of a fantasy-loving crowd because, this book portrayed a lot more fantasy than reality. This book not only intrigued me but the emotions in this book were very realistic. Not to mention the twists in the plot were great and kept me reading the whole way through. I gave this book a 4 star rating.

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Summary: Gathering Blue
Review: "Gathering Blue" is about a girl named Kira, who was born with a twisted leg and the skill to weave good-looking cloth. Usually the village people would take distorted babies to the field, a place where someone who was dead or deformed would apparently be eaten by animals. But, her mother protested, and since Kira's father was going to be a member of the Council of Guardians when he returned from a hunt, they let her stay. It happened that her father never returned and many villagers said that he was killed by animals.
After her mother died because of an unknown disease, the Council of Guardians invited her to join them. Her job at the Council was to prepare the singer's robe, a robe worn once a year by a man who sang about her people's past. The job of preparing the singer's robe was not easy because the robe had many tiny stitches. When she finished this job she had to fill in an open space with stitches. The one color she didn't have was blue, and this was the one color she wanted. While she completed the task of the singer's robe, she discovered many secrets of the Council and its helpers.
I thought this was a good book, but I liked "The Giver" better. This book describes Kiras feelings very good. This is a good book for you, especially if you enjoy irregular stories.

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Summary: Gathering Blue
Review: Gathering Blue is a book of adventure into the future. I did not realize it was about the future until my teacher addressed it. I thought it was about a tribe and how they lived and special events.
The story takes place in a village. The plot of the story was pretty interesting. The exposition came out a tad confusing and low in my interest. But then at the court scene and Vandara came into the picture it got more exciting. Kira is the protagonist of the story. She is young teen that goes through a lot of stressful occasions, which a teen would not and should not have to go through, especially alone. She is born without a father and is cripple, he mother dies and Vandara threatens her all in the beginning of the story. Vandara is the antagonist of the story. She wanted Kira out because she took up space and ate too much. Talk about a lot of pressure.
The rising action of the story, I think, would be when Kira goes to court and is granted the right to stay. She becomes the repairer of the singers robe. Matt is the funny character, gives the reader a comedic relief. He is only about 9 or 10 and he likes being dirty, along with his dog Branch. Kira lives in a nice building with running hot water, gets plenty of food and she has her freedom. Thomas, the future carver of the singer's staff lives there too. She and him become great friends. Annabella is the old woman who teaches Kira to dye threads. Unfortunately she dies, which was never expected. The climax is when they are at the festival and matt has a surprise for Kira. It is her father, Christopher. He is an old blind man. Christopher wants to take Kira home with him, to a village with mostly cripple people live and they take care of one another. So they can be a family. The resolution is when Kira says no to her father.
I think the tone of the story is sorrow, relieved, joyful, and comedic at times. The theme of Gathering Blue could be "life is about taking chances, making choices and standing up for yourself, when you are put down by others. Never let someone else tell you, you don't have talent and let your true colors shine." The point of view is third person limited.
I liked Gathering Blue, at first I thought it was not too interesting, but later it got into it. Honestly, it is not the types of books I like to read, but it ended up being a good story. A lot of my classmates said they didn't like the ending. I thought it was a fine ending, I predicted that people killed his father not beasts, but I didn't expect him to really be alive. Overall I thought it was a good book and I enjoyed it.

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Summary: Yes, the future is dim
Review: If modern Western civilization crumbled, what would be the result? Gathering Blue, the companion novel to Lois Lowry's Newbury Award winner The Giver, presents one such insight. Kira, the protagonist, is a 12-year old girl who inhabits a filthy, primitive village where the weak and handicapped are condemned to death. However, her tremendous skill in weaving prevents her twisted leg from bringing her to the same fate, and she is soon set to work on restoring a colorful robe that documents human history. During this time, she discovers, among many other lies, that the village ruling council interns artists in order to create the future as they see fit through the creative processes. At the novel's climax, Kira's father, once thought to be dead, returns to meet his daughter for the first time, and explain that his failed assassin was in fact a Council elder. Yet despite his offer to help her escape to a village founded by the disabled and oppressed, she feels that it is her duty to defy the power-hungry in her midst by working with the other artisans toward creating their own vision of tomorrow.

While this summary may create the illusion that Gathering Blue is a fast-paced, hard-to-put-down mystery novel, the actual product is quite disappointing. The opening section of the novel, which extends roughly until Kira's life has been spared, is both intriguing and suspenseful, but after she receives her formal charge, the general level of excitement dips drastically. The majority of the novel appears to be nothing more than a series of cultural vignettes and independent episodes connected by a weak plot that is hardly apparent until the resolution of the work comes to pass. True, Kira possesses many "central goals" that keep the general flow of the novel from completely falling into a coma, such as her quests to unravel the mystery behind the existence of the beasts, to determine why she has been granted her unique post, to master the art of dyeing cloth, and to finally find her father, but so little attention is brought to these topics that the reader is misled to believe that minor, more obvious conflicts, such as the disappearance of one of Kira's friends, are the entities fueling the action of the novel. In fact, these are nothing more than ropes pulling the story toward the climax and resolution, where the ultimate plot is finally disclosed in a desirably clear manner. It is this use of a fairly covert storyline that brings unnecessary ruin to a literary work of such potential.

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Summary: Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry
Review: Gathering Blue is a great book, full of suspense. It is about a girl named Kira, who lives in a village with her mom until she gets a sickness and dies. She leaves Kira, with her twisted leg, all by herself. A mean woman, Vandara, tries to get Kira kicked out of the village because in her opinion, Kira is useless. Kira gets saved by a man named Jamison, who Kira finds out later tried to kill her father, who she thought was killed by beasts.

I liked how there was another village that treated, in Matt's words, "broken" people, with respect. I also like how that village is the one with blue. I didn't like how Kira didn't go with her dad at the end, although I understand why, and she says that she will go to that village eventually.

I like how Kira, Thomas, and Matt make an adventure of their own and figure out the secret the Council of Guardians is hiding from the village. I also like how Kira is portrayed as a kind and gentle person, shown by the way she visited Jo.

Overall, I think this was a good book, with nice characters that you can follow as they change through the events in the story.

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Summary: Gathering Blue
Review: "Gathering Blue," by Lois Lowry, is the companion book to "The Giver." I never read "The Giver" so I cannot compare the two. The setting of the book is in a futuristic, hunting-gathering village. It is written in 3rd person. The theme seems to be to fight for freedom for yourself and others.

It is about a girl named Kira. Kira is determined, brave, confident and independent. Beasts killed her father and her mother died of an unknown sickness. Her grandfather was part of The Council of Guardians. They are the controllers of the village and are considered very wise. After her mother died, Kira took care of herself. She protected her mother's corpse for 4 days in "The Field of Leaving," until she returned to the village wondering what was going to happen to her.

Kira was born with a twisted leg. The village usually took these kinds of babies to "The Field of Leaving" where they were eaten by beasts. The village people think that she is worthless because she can not weed, plant and tame the beasts but the Council of Guardians spared her life because she could weave exquisitely. Her job was to repair the robe, which was worn by the singer, and illustrated the history of the village. She had to sew a new history in the blank spaces. The job involved getting different color string but she could not find out how to make the coveted color blue.

She meets Matt, who unites her with her father, who she was told, was dead. While on her quest for blue dye, she uncovers secrets of the council and community. Did Kira finish the robe? What really happened to her mother? Sickness or murder? Read the book yourself to find out.

"Gathering Blue," In my opinion was not a great book, but it is surely not the worse. The ending left a lot of loose ends and did not answer all the questions that remained. Overall, the book makes us appreciate our lives and makes us realize all that we take for granted.

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Summary: almost great
Review: I found this book to be a quick read, easy to get through and actually quite interesting (as far as books required for school go). It had good characters, the plot unraveled well, and it made me want to turn to the next page. Personally all of those are definite plus' for the book itself. But there is one area of the book which I did find lacking...the ending! To me it really seemed not to have one, and so I found myself wondering about what might happen next? But anyways, before we get there, I should cover the beginning shouldn't I?
It starts off with a young girl mourning over her mother's death. Right away we can tell the differences between our two worlds as she is much more controlled than many of those in our society. When she returns to Town from "The Field" she is getting ready to rebuild her burnt home when she is informed that the village needs the area to cage their children and their chickens. Kira, who has a twisted leg, is useless to the town, which is why her plot of land was taken. After it is in fact taken away, she is brought to court about whether or not she should be allowed to stay in the village or be sent out to the field herself. thanks to the help of a guardian, she was allowed to stay, in the council edifice, in exchange for her mastery as a seamstress, they wanted her to fix the singers robe, a ceremonial robe worn once a year bye the singer, who sings the history of the world. this is where the plot gets complicated, and we find conspiracies lurking around every corner of the book, however I would so hate to give out the end of the story so I wont go that far, (not that I fully understood the end anyways).
I would say this book is more universal than the 9 - 12 age group given by Amazon. I am 15 and genuinely enjoyed reading the book, for the most part. It isn't a must read, but if you are into a different breed of futuristic sci-fi novels, this could just be the book for you. Even if you didn't fully enjoy the Giver, this book is still good, although I'm sure that having a full understanding of both will help you to link them together in a companionship where in one world technology has become life, and encompasses all, and in the other story, technology has destroyed all, and the world repeatedly needs to start anew. It is a thought provoking novel in itself and although I don't find it to have re-read quality, I admit that I still need to ponder through the end of the book.