Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry is book number 2 of 4 in The Giver series and focuses on a new protagonist named Kira. The paperback version contains 256 pages that are divided into 23 chapters. This puts the chapter average at just over 11 pages per chapter. That may seem like short chapters, but remember that this book's target audience is middle school to early high school age readers. Keeping chapter lengths relatively short helps to keep readers moving through the book because they get frequent feedback that they are making progress through the book. Interestingly enough, The Giver is also a book that contains 23 chapters. Book 3 of the series, The Messenger, contains 21 chapters, and the final book of the series is broken into three different sections and totals 45 chapters.

Lois Lowry's novel, Gathering Blue, is a companion book to The Giver. There are twenty-three chapters in this book that center upon the life of Kira. In chapter one when the reader first meets Kira, a young, handicapped girl, she is mourning her mother's death. According to custom, Kira must sit beside her mother's body at the Field of Leaving until her mother's spirit escapes. After four days, Kira is able to leave her mother's dead body. She no longer has a home or a family. However, in the last chapter, twenty-three, the reader discovers that Kira has been reunited with her father, Christopher. However, she has come to the harsh realization of her survival; the guardians needed the creative power of the artists for themselves. She decides to stay at the village, and Matt will lead her blind father home. As a parting gift, Christopher gives Kira blue threads from his shirt for her to weave while she waits for her plants to grow.