Dear fellow classmates,

I recently finished the book The City Of Ember as my book club book with my two partners Robbie Bruce and Michael Cruz. I chose this book because i thought it would be interesting to read about what life would be like in an underground city and how much different it would be from our life and society today.

 

The book starts off talking about what the city of ember really is. The backstory is that the world is ending and to keep humanity alive the builders made an underground city with its only light sources being lights above powered by a super generator.

 

A boy named Doon Harrow, is a young man who is passionate about learning, And believes he is going to save Ember and all of its people. He thinks he can do this by getting close to the generator, learning about electricity, and fixing it, But when he instead gets the assigned job of messenger which is not close to the generator he asks Lina to switch jobs when she got pipeworks worker. The second main character is Lina Mayfleet, A girl who truly believes there is another city other than ember, and that it is supposed to be a place where all of Ember goes to be safe again. Lina wanted the job as messenger more than any job in all of Ember. The reason Doon and Lina want to help save the city is because lately in Ember there has been blackouts, in the book it states that a year ago before the book starts the lights over the city only sometimes flickered and now the longest blackout was four minutes of complete darkness. No light. No Vision. Just black. And the reason this is such a big del is that there is no such thing as a moveable light not even candles.

 

When Lina’s grandmother and little sister Poppy are going through an old closet poppy finds a little metal box with instructions on how to get out of Ember the catch is… Poppy chewed it up. This was the biggest problem in the entire book because Lina and Doon could only make out a couple of words in each step of the instructions, So Lina and Doon have to decode each sentence one by one.

I was happy with how much i enjoyed reading this book, though it was an easy read and wasn’t very long i had a great time reading it and would happily read it again if i had to. The one thing i didn’t like about this book was that it was very predictable and there wasn’t anything i was really shocked or surprised by, For example when Doon and Lina were deciphering the instructions it said “Next to the door there will be a small steel pan-” and it was cut off at that point and it was obvious to me that it meant not small steel pan but small steel panel. The author Jeanne DuPrau made the revelation of this like it was something absolutely crazy and nobody could have ever thought of it as being panel.

But in conclusion i did have a great time reading this book, and though it wasn’t very suspenseful at any particular part it was a fast, easy read that i would recommend to anybody who wants a book they can finish in under a week or so.

-Ryan H