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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

Teenage Kira lives in a futuristic society with an authoritarian ruling class that controls everything, including creativity. Her fellow villagers shun Kira after her mother dies. But a member of the Council of Guardians who is impressed with the girl’s weaving ability saves her from certain death. Kira quickly gains a comfortable new home inside the Council Edifice where she is assigned to work on maintaining and restoring the ancient Singer’s robe, a ceremonial garment with the history of Kira’s people woven into it. While her new life is highly regulated, she has some freedom to interact with other creative people working on assigned tasks. These interactions, coupled with Kira’s access to her people’s history, cause her to begin to question the things she’s accepted as true. This dystopic future society by Lois Lowry explores some of the same issues she raised in The Giver (Houghton Mifflin, 1993): how storytelling and ritual play an important part in keeping a culture alive, and how access to history is the key to finding truth. (Ages 13-16)

CCBC Choices 2001 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2001. Used with permission.

From Publisher's Weekly

September 25, 2000
After conjuring the pitfalls of a technologically advanced society in The Giver, Lowry looks toward a different type of future to create this dark, prophetic tale with a strong medieval flavor. Having suffered numerous unnamed disasters (aka, the Ruin), civilization has regressed to a primitive, technology-free state; an opening author's note describes a society in which "disorder, savagery, and self-interest" rule. Kira, a crippled young weaver, has been raised and taught her craft by her mother, after her father was allegedly killed by "beasts." When her mother dies, Kira fears that she will be cast out of the village. Instead, the society's Council of Guardians installs her as caretaker of the Singer's robe, a precious ceremonial garment depicting the history of the world and used at the annual Gathering. She moves to the Council Edifice, a gothic-style structure, one of the few to survive the Ruin. The edifice and other settings, such as the Fen--the village ghetto--and the small plot where Annabella (an elder weaver who mentors Kira after her mother's death) lives are especially well drawn, and the characterizations of Kira and the other artists who cohabit the stone residence are the novel's greatest strength. But the narrative hammers at the theme of the imprisoned artist. And readers may well predict where several important plot threads are headed (e.g., the role of Kira's Guardian, Jamison; her father's disappearance), while larger issues, such as the society's downfall, are left to readers' imaginations. Ages 10-up.

From AudioFile Magazine

Left alone by her mother's sudden death in a savage future where life is ruled by fear and memory and humans feel powerless to affect their fate, Kira is a different breed, an artist who expresses her vision in colored thread on cloth. Such a gift, however, matters little to the general populace, scrabbling as they must to survive in a hostile physical world, particularly when the artist is imperfect, as Kira is, with her twisted leg and hobbled walk. Katherine Borowitz delivers an unimpassioned, measured reading, a superb match for the dispassionate tone of Lowry's novel. Her voice softens and glimmers with emotion only when the text rests solidly within Kira's thoughts, or when she remembers her dead mother's loving tones. The solemnity and mystery of the novel are frequently relieved, however, by the charming impulsivity and crude Fen dialect of the waif, Matt, which Borowitz flawlessly captures. T.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine