Spotlighted Book: The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2019 4:39 pm
Our next recommendation for world-building, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, is a speculative sci-fi novel that takes place in a grittier kind of world. It plays with the question of what happens when the place that you’ve always known begins to die a slow death around you.
Synopsis from Goodreads:
Here are some discussion prompts to help you frame your response. Feel free to totally ignore them – we’d like to hear what you think!
Synopsis from Goodreads:
Many hundreds of years ago, the city of Ember was created by the Builders to contain everything needed for human survival. It worked…but now the storerooms are almost out of food, crops are blighted, corruption is spreading through the city and worst of all—the lights are failing. Soon Ember could be engulfed by darkness…
But when two children, Lina and Doon, discover fragments of an ancient parchment, they begin to wonder if there could be a way out of Ember. Can they decipher the words from long ago and find a new future for everyone? Will the people of Ember listen to them?
Here are some discussion prompts to help you frame your response. Feel free to totally ignore them – we’d like to hear what you think!
- Do you think hearing the everyday facts of people’s lives in a strange world is the best way to get to know it? Or does it start to get in the way of the plot after a while?
- Do you think solid world-building is enough to make you suspend your disbelief about something unlikely? Is it less of a problem when there is magic or very advanced science to explain things away?
- What differences do you think there are between creating a world for a fantasy novel and one for a sci-fi or speculative fiction novel?