The People Of Sparks
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Work has been keeping me very busy and when I haven’t been working I have been packing getting ready to move into our new place. Having said that, I have found a little time now and then to do a little reading. I have been reading The People of Sparks, by Jeanne DuPrau and just finished it. It is the sequel to City of Ember and picks up directly where that one left off.
Possible spoilers…
This book starts with our heros, having told the rest of the city how to escape, as refugees wandering the wasteland. One main feature of the book is the lack of knowledge about the world these people who have lived their entire lives in a cave have. The people of sparks take pity on them though and let them stay, hoping to teach them what they need to know and then send them on their way. This book spends more time on the larger happenings in the town and so has less time for internal dialog of the characters that made the last one so intriguing to me.
Having said that, Lena does get a hero’s journey, which allows her to travel a road of self discovery and provide the readers with the hope for the future. Pretty much every other arc focuses mainly on the folly of man, but hers transcends that and allows us to see a better world.
In the end of course we are shown that people of “today” are still people and can do bad things, and that disagreements will happen. You just need a way to work through them. It does not gloss over the fact that doing the right thing is often the more difficult path. This book has plenty of moralizing, possibly aimed at current events, but the plot is actually pretty good and carries it along. The point counterpoint of events in the village to events on the journey is especially poignant. Definitely worth a read.