People of Sparks

People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau. Read by Wendy Dillon. This is the sequel to The City of Ember, which you might recall I enjoyed. It was a nice little post-apocalyptic kind of story, ending happily when our characters escaped from the dying City of Ember. The tension and interest level went way up with this book, though, as the people of Ember try to make new lives for themselves in the outside world. DuPrau refuses to settle for easy answers. The people of Ember manage to find a village called Sparks – one of the largest villages established since the Disaster. It has 350 or so inhabitants, about 100 fewer than the Ember survivors. The leaders of Sparks decide to help the Emberites, but it’s rough going for a barely-past subsistence village to double in population overnight. And while the Emberites work hard for their keep, they haven’t been used to hard labor, sunlight, or life without electricity. Resentment springs up quickly on both sides, and only Lina and Doon seem to be looking for a way to keep the petty conflicts from escalating into all-out war. It takes awhile for them to get around to the search, though. Doon is taken with Tick, a charismatic Emberite calling for justice. Lina takes a trip with some Roamers, who comb pre-Disaster settlements for usable artifacts, on her own search for the sparkling white city of her imagination. The inevitable violent conflict was a little slow in coming, but was still an interesting and fairly realistic look at conflict and how to work around it.