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Gathering Blue is a story of resilience and beauty despite adversity, hope in the face of fear, and above all Kira’s quest for truth in a society built on deception. From the very beginning, Kira is depicted as a downtrodden outsider, a disabled and orphaned young woman in a village that disposes of anyone perceived to be weak or ill. Kira’s home village is a chaotic and hostile place that values useffxfulness above all other qualities, but Kira’s unique circumstances and upbringing by her widowed mother have taught her to think differently. Kira’s innate creative gift for weaving also sets her apart from her community and attracts the attention of the Council of Guardians, which seeks to capture her creativity for its own purposes. When the belligerent Vandara attempts to cast Kira out of the village after the death of Kira’s mother, she inadvertently sets off a chain of events that will lead to Kira’s eventual discovery of the truth about the village, and a way to heal it.
The first several chapters of Gathering Blue establish the shape of Kira’s world, which is filled with idiosyncratic rules, strange traditions, and unusual slang terms. The setting swiftly moves from the Field of Leaving on the outskirts of the village, to the village itself, to the Council Edifice when Kira reports for the trial against Vandara. This is Kira’s whole world until she takes on her new role as Weaver and begins to test the strict boundaries she has always known. Beginning with the indoor plumbing in her own private bathroom, she repeatedly comes face to face with the unfamiliar, learns through a combination of help from others and her own experience, and integrates this new knowledge into her ever-expanding worldview. She ventures into the woods to take dyeing lessons from Annabella, and eventually travels into the Fen to understand more about Matt and Jo’s way of life. She meets the other artists—Thomas, Annabella, and finally Jo—each of whom share with Kira a mix of concrete information and new perspectives that guide her to the truth she must inevitably learn about the village before she can bring about change.
As Kira repairs and restores the Singer’s robe, she also slowly unravels the web of lies on which the village is built. Kira’s first hint that everything may not be as it seems comes from Annabella, the elderly dyer whose declaration that there are no beasts introduces doubt into Kira’s worldview. After that, Kira begins asking questions of the people around her until the seed of doubt that Annabella planted has blossomed into full-blown skepticism. The fact that Kira’s gradual discovery of the truth parallels the painstaking work she does on the robe deepens the power of threading as a metaphor for storytelling. Though Kira is anxious about taking on the responsibility of embroidering the future into the blank spaces on the robe, her eventual success is foreshadowed by the improvement in the robe’s condition as she learns the truth about her world. Kira’s ability to dismantle the deceitful stories she has been told corresponds directly with her ability to repair the robe, which will transition into her ability to use the threads to create her own stories.
In a society that has no use for art unless it can be used to engender fear and exert social control, Kira’s realization that she is held captive despite her freedom of movement allows her to see art’s potential for transformative change. Kira’s talent for weaving has always brought joy to herself and the people around her, but the more progress she makes on her restoration of the Singer’s robe, the more joyless her work becomes. Her hands begin to tire and ache, and she finds she can relate to Jo’s complaints about the physical pain of being forced to learn and sing songs that aren’t her own. Only after speaking to Jo does it finally hit Kira that her physical freedom and creature comforts are meaningless as long as the Council of Guardians is holding her creativity captive. Now that her creative freedom has been taken from her, Kira longs for the everyday struggles of her old life because she understands art’s power to set her free regardless of her material circumstances. However, Kira’s knowledge is still incomplete because it is limited to her own inner life as an artist. To complete her development and Gathering Blue’s overarching plot, she must discover art’s power to change and influence society as a whole.
Among its characters, Jamison and Vandara are the closest Gathering Blue has to antagonists, but Kira’s primary adversary is something much more insidious: a fearful community that does not know change is possible. Fear controls Kira’s village, most viscerally embodied in the omnipresent threat of beasts that supposedly live just outside the village’s boundaries and promise ugly death to anyone who dares venture into the unknown. Inside the village, as Vandara’s threatening presence shows, there are still overt dangers that require constant vigilance, especially for anyone perceived as weak, like Kira. There are also covert dangers that hide behind friendly faces, just as Jamison takes on the role of Kira’s defender and liaison to the Council, all while never revealing that he was responsible for her father’s apparent death. Neither Jamison nor Vandara appear in Gathering Blue’s final act because, in the end, they are only symptoms of the village’s deeper corruption. Rather than needing to defeat the characters who have tried to hold her back, it is only after Kira has demystified and neutralized everything she was always taught to fear that she can make the choices necessary to help forge a better future.
The open-ended nature of Gathering Blue’s conclusion reflects the culmination of what Kira has learned since her story began. Limitations have always defined Kira’s world: where she can go, what she can do, and, most importantly, what she is allowed to know. Anything that threatens those narrow confinements is considered a danger to the community at large because it destabilizes the Council’s control over the village’s population. In her decision to stay behind in the village rather than follow Christopher, Kira chooses uncertainty and hope that she will be able to change her village. Kira rejoices in the opportunity to let her creativity take control of the threads that will guide her to complete the robe and design a better future for her community, because she has learned the value of not having everything decided for her. This ending may seem unsatisfying, as if Gathering Blue ends on a cliffhanger, but in its full context, Kira’s final, emancipatory choice to be flexible and open to what the future holds completes her narrative arc without leaving any loose ends.
