The City of Ember is a very popular book with fourth and fifth graders. It’s also an ALA Notable Book. I’ve been hearing about it for years.
The brief prologue explains that when the city of Ember was built, the builders wanted the people to stay in the city for 200 years. The builders provided instructions for eventually leaving the city in a special box with a timed lock.
When the story begins, two hundred and forty one years have passed. The city of Ember is dying. The stored food is coming to an end. Everything is reused and remade. Most disturbing of all are the more and more frequent blackouts in this underground city. A few people have tried to venture out in the dark Unknown Regions, but no one has made it very far since they don’t have any way to carry light. No one is even sure that there is a world beyond theirs.
Lina and Doon are twelve. They have just been assigned jobs of messenger and repairing the pipes. They are old enough to notice the trouble the city is in and resolve to do something about it. With luck and searching, they do find messages from the past, and the way out of Ember. Along the way though, they make enemies of the corrupt mayor who is hoarding food, and almost get arrested. They have to puzzle through an old document left by the original builders. Lina’s baby sister chewed up the papers. So the reader gets to puzzle through clues along with the characters.
As an adult reader I wanted more from this book about how their society worked. Things like marriage, death, political processes, and why exactly this society was built aren’t really addressed. Lina’s grandmother dies in the story, but there is no mention of funeral or burial. I also wondered about canned food lasting more than two hundred years. But even with those things, the book works. And it did seem to be written from the point of view of twelve year olds, not an adult author trying to write as a child. I also loved the descriptions of their world.
I recommend this book especially for reluctant readers. It’s a quick read with lots of dialogue, lots of action, mystery, and adventure, and the vocabulary isn’t challenging. And I have to say that I’m so intrigued by this world that I already put the next two books in the series on hold at the library.
Also See:
The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan
Howl’s Moving Castle – Diana Wynne Jones
The Jade Dragon – Carolyn Marsden and Virginia Shin-Mui Loh