The City of Ember

The City of Ember, written by Jeanne DuPrau, is a modern dystopian with simple writing involved. The Ideal part about this book is that it takes over the end of the world and feels more helpless than ever for the city falling apart. The best theme to fit this story is to me in quotes “making a lie for more than one can make danger of millions of innocent lives” –Ben Mowitz.

This book is of course a dystopian fiction. Not only does it make a good atmosphere but makes a big problem to strive towards instead of just fixing the whole Dystopia. This takes place in the end of the world with only one city being left in the darkness of the world. The story is told in a third person omniscient and sort of limits it to two characters in the story and are mainly the protagonists. These two characters are Lina MayFleet and Doon Harrow, and they switch off around the story and take in their thoughts and feelings in the process. The city of ember is the setting and shows the main problem to the characters (almost all of them). The city of ember is flickering from the lights that are produced on lamps and light bulbs, and soon it gets blackouts. These blackouts occur more and more as the story goes on. Soon these two characters get suspicious of this activity and find out that they are both looking at the same thing. They go out and try to solve their many questions. Like, why are there so many blackouts? What’s out in the darkness? Will we soon lose supplies to the city? Is there and Exit? May I also note that there other problem is that there soon running out of supplies for them to live a healthy and needed lifestyle and soon things are getting scarcer for the city, and that’s where the climax kicks in. I couldn’t find as much powerful or inspiring quotes to go to this story so sorry.

To me this book earns a title of a good book, but it doesn’t be too powerful in its wording. More or less it takes up not that much time to read and sort of doesn’t feel like a good story at the end and may I note it was a sequel to begin where they left off. But in my opinion it didn’t feel so fulfilling to read it and felt more like it was meant for an 11 year old more than a Teen. Taking up a lot of my time to this book was fun but to me I still feel like I should have picked something better, also to note that I’ve read the hunger games before this. To me this is better for young readers because a reader of my age can easily suspect something to happen over the description it gives you instead of it saying it’s that item or that thing. Even though this sort of aspect made it show that the society that they lived in thought this particular item was strange. To me I suggest giving it to a kid with a good mental thought of reading to get into this. I feel like it’s more of a beginners Dystopia more than an intriguing Dystopia.

Book Review by Ben M.