Gathering Blue and Messenger

After finishing The Giver, I was eager to read these two sequels. I knew going into it that they would be more the "same-world-different-people" kind of sequels, but I was excited anyway; The Giver is so amazing, the sequels had to be good, right? And they were good. But neither of them had anything on The Giver, I thought. They're both very interesting books, very compelling, very disturbing, very symbolic, and very religious - surprisingly. They're not overtly religious, but if you've read Messenger, you can't deny that there are some serious Christian parallels present at the end. I enjoyed reading them. I wonder if I would have liked them better, had The Giver not been so amazing...