Parenthetical.net

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

People of Sparks is the sequel to City of Ember. The entire population of dying Ember (…yeah) follows Lina and Doon aboveground for their first taste of fresh air, sky, and a world not run by ancient machines they don’t understand. Since they’re totally useless in this world, it’s fortunate for them that they find the town of Sparks.

…But it’s not so fortunate for Sparks. They want to do the right thing, but adding the Emberites will double their population. Hundreds of years after the mysterious Disaster (insert your favorite apocalypse here), most surviving towns are barely eking out a living; Sparks is more prosperous than most, rocking the gardens and livestock, but they’re afraid the Emberites will eat them back to starvation.

City of Ember is a good book, your standard two-kids-save-their-community adventure story. But People of Sparks steps out of the generic shadows into the limelight. You might even say it shines! (Ok, I’ll stop with the puns now.) It sets up a genuinely challenging conflict: the people of Ember can’t survive without seriously straining Sparks’ resources, but the people of Sparks can’t kick the Emberites out without losing their morality.

Lina and Doon save the day, of course, but the rest of the characters aren’t sheep the way they were in City of Ember. They want to do the right thing, but they don’t want it to be too hard: they’re human. Even the true villain is understandable (though he’s the weakest link in the book). The book has a clear message — tit for tat starts wars — but I didn’t feel bludgeoned (for a young YA novel, anyway).

The solution is a bit too simple, but honestly, the conflict is so realistically insurmountable that DuPrau almost wrote herself into a corner. It’s not the sort of book in which characters are going to murder each other in a bloody food war, so I can’t complain about the happy ending. I read the whole thing in a day, and it gets the secular humanist hippie stamp of approval! Skip over City of Ember and head straight for this one.