Winter Break Book Review (Gossamer)

John Broadhead

Gossamer is a novel written by a woman named Lois Lowery. Lois is a very popular author and has won numerous awards including the Newbery Medal twice (for The Giver and Number the Star). I understand that this award is for children’s books so none of this reading is SAT worthy, but Lois is one of the only authors that can write a book I can finish without getting bred and forget about it before I finish. She has written a trilogy with the three books, The Giver, Gathering Blue, and Messenger and I’ve read each one and enjoyed actually following an interesting story though the end.  Her books are very inspirational and thoughtful. She speaks a lot about being kind to one another and doing the right thing. I read a lot of her books when I was little and even when I’m older I’m still learning from the lessons in her books.

The book, Gossamer, is based on how dreams are given and what happens when we are asleep. There are dream givers who go around and touch colors, words, sounds, and scents to create dreams to give to each assigned human. There are also Sinisteeds who are like horses who damage dreams and give nightmares, and when the dream givers and the Sinisteeds conflict, things get exiting.

There are 5 main characters in the book. Littlest one is truly the main character because she is one of the dream givers who has the gossamer touch which means she is very delicate. She is very curious and her first mentor Fastidious quit because he found her annoying and so her new mentor became Thin Elderly. This character knows a lot and can help Littlest one the most and him and discover a lot with their assigned family. They were first assigned to this lonely woman and her dog but then she takes in this 7 year old boy named John who has been through a rough life. The woman is treated poorly by John but she only treats him with love and tries to make him appreciate his life. John’s actual mom is struggling in her life because she and John were beat by her husband and she is getting a divorce but he won’t let her leave. She is poor, skinny, messy, and very unhappy. She becomes a receptionist to try to make money and build a life where she can take care of John in a better life. This woman has a dream giver named Strapping who got assign this woman as a punishment because Strapping is inconsiderate and doesn’t care about what he does. This dream giver though discovers what she was going through and what she was dreaming of and he learned from her and starts to care and become a lot more loving throughout the novel.

The writing style was simple but also very thoughtful and deep. It talks about how people need one another to survive and feel complete. Lois Lowery writes all of her books a little bit like this. It’s about finding who you are and finding a way to love it.

“This gathering, this dwelling place where they slept now, heaped together, was only one, a relatively small one, of many. It was a small subcolony of dream-givers. Every human population has countless such colonies-invisible always-of these well-organized, attentive, and hard-working creatures who move silently through the night as their task

Their task is both simple and at the same time immensely difficult.

            Through touching, they gather material: memories, colors, words once spoken, hints of scents and the tiniest fragments of forgotten sound. They collect pieces of the past, of long ago and of yesterday. They combine these things carefully, creating dreams. Then they insert the dreams as the humans (and sometimes animals, for occasionally they give dreams to pets, as well) sleep.

The act of dream insertion is called bestowal. It is very delicate. It requires absolute precision to bestow a dream, or even to decide exactly when one should be bestowed.

Littlest, the one who was only learning, had not yet studied bestowal. She was beginning the way they all had, with the touching, the gathering of material.”

I recommend this book to anyone who is creative and is open to expanding their mind to strange new ideas. I love thinking about how dreams work and this book gets right into it and you get attached to it.