Module 5: The City of Ember

Module 5: The City of Ember

Book Summary:

Ember was built was built to be the perfect, self-sustaining city, and though it was stranded in the middle of eternal darkness, it was always kept lit by the large floodlights throughout the city and a generator beneath the city that provided the power to keep everything functioning. However, the blackouts are happening more often and for longer periods of time. Supplies are running perilously low and crops are failing. With no way to carry light and no place to go, the community of Ember seems doomed to oblivion. However when Lina finds pieces of a mysterious old message in her closet, she wonders if the words may be the key to escaping Ember and finding their way to another world. With the help of Doon who explores the pipe-works beneath the city, they decode the message and find a way to escape to a fabled place of safety and light.

APA Reference of Book:

DuPrau, J. (2003). The city of ember. New York, NY: Random House Children’s Books.

Impressions:

With so many dystopias filling the young adult genre, it was nice to find one that broke away from many of the stereotypes. First of all, it started out in decay. It had once been the perfect society that many dystopias seem to have on the surface, but when the novel starts, the city of Ember that had always had plenty starts running out of the vital supplies that had once filled the storerooms to the brim. In many novels the society starts out as perfection and decays as the novel progresses, but this novel started with a society that was already scared and functioning on very little. Secondly, the novel was written with a younger reading audience in mind. The idea of the dystopia and a perfect yet not at all perfect society came across clearly but more simply and with less complex or mature themes than are usually found in high school level dystopian books. In the midst of this decaying society, we had not one protagonist but two! While many books have a main character and some secondary supporting characters, this novel had two active main characters driving the action.

As Ember was a city built to be completely self-sustaining underground and has been around for generations, it is interesting to see how things would have changed for this society. There is no understanding of the concept of a sky or a sun or what might lie beyond the darkness that permeates their community. When the generator fails, there is nothing but darkness. The author does an excellent job setting up this hypothetical community in a future where at one point it became unsafe to live on the world of the surface. This idea of moving the human population to a safe place due to environmental hazards seems to be its own sub-genre within the dystopian genre. For example, books such as Under the Never Sky by Veronica Roth and The Maze Runner by James Dashner also consider this possibility.

Professional Review:

This promising debut is set in a dying underground city. Ember, which was founded and stocked with supplies centuries ago by “The Builders,” is now desperately short of food, clothes, and electricity to keep the town illuminated. Lina and Doon find long-hidden, undecipherable instructions that send them on a perilous mission to find what they believe must exist: an exit door from their disintegrating town. In the process, they uncover secret governmental corruption and a route to the world above. Well-paced, this contains a satisfying mystery, a breathtaking escape over rooftops in darkness, a harrowing journey into the unknown and cryptic messages for readers to decipher. The setting is well-realized with the constraints of life in the city intriguingly detailed. The likable protagonists are not only courageous but also believably flawed by human pride, their weaknesses often complementing each other in interesting ways. The cliffhanger ending will leave readers clamoring for the next installment. (Fiction. 9-13)

The city of Ember. (2010). [Review of the book The city of Ember, by J. DuPrau]. Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from: http://www.kirkusreviews.com

Library Uses:

Have middle school students in a book club discuss other, possibly better solutions for the survival of humanity during an environmental crisis.

Add to a list of dystopian novels suitable for the younger side of young adults.