Review: The City of Ember
[Reposted from 2005]
I have to admit, The City of Ember caught my eye because of its cover. The cover of the paperback is a slightly shiny metallic bronze color, with a single light bulb, the filament of which spells out the word "ember." It's very aesthetically pleasing.
Ember is classified as a young adult book, and while I did end up enjoying it, it commits itself to a fallacy that I think young adult literature needs to strive harder to overcome: it talks down to the reader.
One of the main reasons that the Harry Potter books are so insanely popular is that, while definitely aimed at a young audience, Rowling never dumbs down her story or her language to "accommodate" her younger readers. Quite frankly, they don't need it. Society does quite enough dumbing down for our kids, and personally, I think what they need more of is a challenge.
[/soapbox]
The City of Ember is the story of a city where it is dark all the time, but there is no moon, and no stars. The sky is black, and the city is lit entirely by electric lights, which have begun to fail. At one time the citizens of Ember had all they could want in the way of material goods like clothes and canned food, but now things have begun to run out. There is even a rumor going around that they are running out of light bulbs, and if the lights go out in Ember...
The story follows two twelve year old children, Lina and Doon. At the end of their school year when they are twelve, all children get assigned a job in the city. Lina wants to be a messenger, but she draws the dreaded job of pipesworker, fixing and maintaining the water pipes that run under the city. Doon draws messenger and offers to trade -- he wants to work in the pipeworks, because he wants to try to figure out how to fix the electricity.
But there's very little a twelve year old boy can do, when no one in all of Ember really understands the generator, or the electricity. When Lina finds part of an old message, however, she and Doon realize that there may be a way out of Ember and a better life for everyone.
The plot and the characters are engaging, but, as I said, unsophisticated. Lina and Doon don't think or speak or act the way I would expect a normal twelve-year-old person to act, and they certainly don't act as though they are adults, which is what the book would have you believe -- they get jobs when they are twelve and become productive members of society.
Honestly, I feel as though the author might have been missing a bet, trying to simplify her story for children. The message that Lina finds could have been an excellent plot device to engage the audience into trying to figure it out with her, but the author doesn't provide us with enough clues to figure it out for ourselves; so when Lina and Doon do begin to translate bits of the message, it's almost anticlimactic, because it seems to come too easily to them.
The one other thing that bothered me about this book is that it ends with a cliffhanger. It's a particular pet peeve of mine that books should not end with the characters hovering between life and death, and although Doon and Lina are not dangling from a cliff or watching an army ready for the attack, their situation at the end of the book is no less hazardous. The City of Ember is not a long book, which makes me wonder why the author chose to make it two (the second is called The People of Sparks) instead of simply continuing the story to its logical conclusion.
Overall: a tad disappointing, which, I suppose, teaches me that I should stop choosing my books by their covers, no matter how intriguing...
I have to admit, The City of Ember caught my eye because of its cover. The cover of the paperback is a slightly shiny metallic bronze color, with a single light bulb, the filament of which spells out the word "ember." It's very aesthetically pleasing.
Ember is classified as a young adult book, and while I did end up enjoying it, it commits itself to a fallacy that I think young adult literature needs to strive harder to overcome: it talks down to the reader.
One of the main reasons that the Harry Potter books are so insanely popular is that, while definitely aimed at a young audience, Rowling never dumbs down her story or her language to "accommodate" her younger readers. Quite frankly, they don't need it. Society does quite enough dumbing down for our kids, and personally, I think what they need more of is a challenge.
[/soapbox]
The City of Ember is the story of a city where it is dark all the time, but there is no moon, and no stars. The sky is black, and the city is lit entirely by electric lights, which have begun to fail. At one time the citizens of Ember had all they could want in the way of material goods like clothes and canned food, but now things have begun to run out. There is even a rumor going around that they are running out of light bulbs, and if the lights go out in Ember...
The story follows two twelve year old children, Lina and Doon. At the end of their school year when they are twelve, all children get assigned a job in the city. Lina wants to be a messenger, but she draws the dreaded job of pipesworker, fixing and maintaining the water pipes that run under the city. Doon draws messenger and offers to trade -- he wants to work in the pipeworks, because he wants to try to figure out how to fix the electricity.
But there's very little a twelve year old boy can do, when no one in all of Ember really understands the generator, or the electricity. When Lina finds part of an old message, however, she and Doon realize that there may be a way out of Ember and a better life for everyone.
The plot and the characters are engaging, but, as I said, unsophisticated. Lina and Doon don't think or speak or act the way I would expect a normal twelve-year-old person to act, and they certainly don't act as though they are adults, which is what the book would have you believe -- they get jobs when they are twelve and become productive members of society.
Honestly, I feel as though the author might have been missing a bet, trying to simplify her story for children. The message that Lina finds could have been an excellent plot device to engage the audience into trying to figure it out with her, but the author doesn't provide us with enough clues to figure it out for ourselves; so when Lina and Doon do begin to translate bits of the message, it's almost anticlimactic, because it seems to come too easily to them.
The one other thing that bothered me about this book is that it ends with a cliffhanger. It's a particular pet peeve of mine that books should not end with the characters hovering between life and death, and although Doon and Lina are not dangling from a cliff or watching an army ready for the attack, their situation at the end of the book is no less hazardous. The City of Ember is not a long book, which makes me wonder why the author chose to make it two (the second is called The People of Sparks) instead of simply continuing the story to its logical conclusion.
Overall: a tad disappointing, which, I suppose, teaches me that I should stop choosing my books by their covers, no matter how intriguing...
posted by Lacy at
8:38 AM
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