You can feel the world-building in this series.

The cover describes Gathering Blue as “A Companion to [b:The Giver|3636|The Giver (The Giver, #1)|Lois Lowry|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1342493368l/3636.SY75.jpg|2543234]”, and I think that’s accurate. The story itself doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Giver, and it doesn’t intersect with it at all. It’s not even explicitly stated that it’s set in the same world. But somehow, you know it is.

It has the same tone, the same writing style, and many of the same themes. It’s easy to imagine and assume that Kira of Gathering Blue just lives in a different settlement to The Giver’s Jonas. A very different settlement with different rules and cultural norms. But the previous book did hint that such settlements exist, after all.

In this one, we also learn a little more of the history of the world. It’s clearly science fiction, because the old lore hints at great cities, with tall buildings scraping the sky, which are no more.

Much of what I felt while reading The Giver is echoed here: you feel the classic YA Dystopian tropes coming through. The Chosen One, the unlikely romance, the story that starts on the precipice of some significant event in the settlement's life.

But much like The Giver, those things feel new, and fresh, and exciting, because you quickly realise that when this series was written, they weren’t tropes at all, and every other YA dystopian story since has copied from it. And not particularly well, either.

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