I really don't see the point of an anti-religion tirade at this point in the series. Also, I'm weary of the ineffective adults in her books. Is any mother or father present in their child's life?

This book is a trap. It's advertised as a Book of Ember #3 when, really, except for a vague reference at the very end of the novel which seems to have been thrown in as an afterthought, it shares no relation to the first two installments in the series. Makes a reader feel tricked into reading it.

Furthermore, it's dull. It was tedious to read it, I didn't care about any of the characters, and I felt like stabbing Mrs. Beeson in the eye - not out of strength of feeling, but just to see something actually happen.

I don't even know why I'm giving the thing a 2-star rating... Perhaps because I reserve 1 for the ones that really pissed me off?

This should be called "The prophet of Yawnwood". I can overlook flaws in a book if the story and characters are interesting enough, but this was pretty boring and the main character was annoying. My biggest problem is that as a prequel to "The City of Ember", this book should have given us a clearer picture of the world before people decided to go into a city underground to save themselves from disaster. The first two books hint at wars and terrorism and I was hoping that this one would give us more. In this book we still only get vague descriptions of war and terrorism. The author could have done so much more with this considering all the problems that our world could potentially face and the events in this book should have been much worse in order to set up the City of Ember scenario. Instead this story centers around the life of an eleven year old girl and the small town of Yonwood which has been swept up in a wave of religious fundamentalism due to the visions of an elderly lady they call the prophet. A few church leaders in the community have placed themselves in charge of interpreting the prophet's words and they end of making some pretty ridiculous laws for the town. Nickie, the main character wants to be a good person and starts out thinking that this means obeying the laws, but throughout the book she does some soul searching and learns to think for herself and finds her own personal spirituality not based on organized religion. This is a good message, but a message in a book only works if the book is actually good. I think "Ember" and "Sparks" were more successful because the author had more limitations placed on her in creating the worlds presented in those books. Within those confines she was able to paint very detailed pictures of what those worlds were like. In "Yonwood", the setting is basically our world maybe 20 years from now. It's a much bigger world to imagine and there were a lot of places she could have gone with it. She tries to go too many places and ends up going nowhere. How disappointing!

Two of the concerns that pop up in the negative reviews for this book are ones I want to address:

1. It has nothing to do with the other books in the Ember series.

2. It engages in religion-bashing/it’s basically a soap box for the author regarding political or religion-related ideas, which doesn’t belong in a juvenile book.

So, yeah. A few thoughts that make for a longer review that I had planned:

1. I knew going in that this was the odd-book-out in the Ember series, and it didn’t bug me too much that “Yonwood” does not share a setting or characters with the previous books. I like how DuPrau writes children, who have interests and ideas and do not always understand what is going on in the community at large. I enjoy the reading their thoughts about what is going on, their desires and expectations for their own lives, etc. I didn’t mind spending a book with Nickie and especially Grover instead of Lina and Doon.

The extent to which this book is unrelated to the others, though, is so great that it feels a bit like the publishing company put one over on the readers. “Yonwood” could have been a stand-alone novel and might have drawn less ire as one, though some other aspects of the book also drag it down. I listened to the audiobook, and sometime during part 4 (of 5) I began to seriously lose interest. It got a little boring after a while, and some of the plot developments were hard to believe.  They’re going to randomly put a bracelet on a kid that renders going to school unlikely, practically impossible? Seriously? Who has this authority? And the prophet’s alleged “no dogs” pronouncement (though it makes for a relatable situation about things that are not harmful being labeled as such). When the no-dog policy is introduced, I just wondered how stupid the people of Yonwood could be. Really. No dogs? They didn’t discuss at this point that maybe the prophet is just sick and not muttering the words of God? Also, it is difficult to take seriously references to “a shield of goodness” or a terrorist plotting in the woods, particularly when the audiobook narrator sounds like she’s saying “terrist” or “terrace” in the woods every time. (She was a good narrator overall, though.)  The setting was also distracting, a confusing version of small town in North Carolina that seems no different than our own, with similar technology but with buzzing sinner bracelets and pseudo Phalanx Nations. I get wanting to show correlations between the Yonwood story and our present-day climate of war, politics and religion, but the result is a little muddled and could use more detailed world-building. I am thankful, at least, that the negative portrayal of the people of Yonwood doesn’t match the infuriating sketching of the small South Carolina town in “Beautiful Creatures.” DuPrau is not hateful in her depiction of the ignorance and well-meaning judgmental climate cultivated by Yonwood’s people.

It also has a related lesson about not presuming the worst of the people you do not know, the outsiders, the people who are different than you, which I did like.

The war plotline is one of the elements that does connect this book to its predecessors, though the anti-war sentiment and exploration of how people manipulate a situation to elevate it into a battle was better handled in “The People of Sparks.” The idea of a town living in the shadow of a possible impending war is interesting; in “The Prophet of Yonwood,” it threatens to help morph a book for grade-schoolers into a Treatise on War and Religion. Ugh.

2. Which brings up the other thing. God hasn’t been a player in the previous books, apart from one time when Lina came across the world “God” (or “god”?) or something like it, and hadn’t ever heard it before. (That’s the only part I remember, at least.) God gets pulled into “The Prophet of Yonwood” a lot, often by well-meaning people who are severely foolish in their religious fervor. There’s a lot in the book that could provide starting points for parent-child discussions about God, good and evil, trying to do good, whether we should act as basically the good police when we see other people doing “bad” things, the abuse of politicians claiming God is on their side, and whether any interpretation of God in the book is correct. Is he the God of the stars, which sounds cool but in the context of the book might imply an abstract God who doesn’t care much about the morality of his creation and is just love and light in their broadest, and less potent, definitions. Or is he a “picky’ God who would provide an arbitrary list of “do nots” to a town so they can earn safety in an impending war?

A problem that the book has in dealing with the God question is that it offers no presentation of religiously affiliated faith that isn’t foolish or both foolish and dangerous. DuPrau depicts religion as a thing that leads people astray, separates people, cultivates a sense of needing to judge and punish others, and even ultimately leads to war — all characteristics of human religion, but certainly not the inevitable conclusions to any given religious faith. The people of Yonwood mean well but they do the wrong things in the name of being good and appeasing God. It’s the religion and not the people who are the real antagonist in this novel — which has its strengths (as the religion here is indeed a false one with a lot of problems that reflect ones we see in our own society) and weaknesses (a narrow-minded view of faith in God that is shared with others via a religion or church). Yonwood churchgoers can be depended on to be well-intended but seriously amiss in their application of goodness. These are not churchgoers who actually look to the Bible for guidance, but who have replaced non-arbitrary truth with the words of a sick woman who mumbles them forward into an increasingly strict and ridiculous form of “goodness.” This is a warning that I can heartily agree with: Don’t get your truth from a random person. Do not develop a religion around some woman or man who says something exciting. I would extend that to yourself, as well. Blindly following a church leader, an alleged prophet, or your own fickle and deceptive heart leads you to a place no closer to God and goodness than the people of Yonwood. Religion can feed ignorance when it’s a false religion, or a religion that doesn’t weigh a so-called prophet’s words against the word of God. (I am speaking from a Christian perspective here. The church in Yonwood could have avoided a lot of finger-pointing and spiritual confusion by using the Bible as guidance.)

This soap box part of the book just seems really weird sometimes, for a juvenile novel. I’m surprised the publishing company was cool with the direction “The Prophet of Yonwood” took, both regarding the God talk and the lack of connection to the other Ember novels. “The Prophet of Yonwood” was a surprise, even though I kind of knew what I was getting into. It went further than expected in its God talk and had even less to do with Ember than I expected. (It isn’t a prequel! A prequel would be a welcome addition to the series, but this isn’t one.) But it wasn’t terrible, despite the author defining the religious with all the depth and grace of a political campaign. It is a little bland, and well-intentioned in its discussion of war and religion. Sometimes it hits on something interesting and thought-provoking, but overall it’s a book that means well but doesn’t hit the mark.

The ending felt super rushed and the way each storyline was wrapped up felt extremely forced. The main characters seemed too similar to those in the original books, which were much better. Otherwise, it was all right. 3.75/5

It was a mistake to write a prequel to The City of Ember books. Or maybe it was a mistake to go back as far as DuPrau did. It could have survived the abrupt change of cast if it had at least taken place in Ember, perhaps during the earliest years. There are so many interesting questions to ask of the first generation of Ember: How did they organize their government? Handle money? Assign jobs? Deal with outcasts or criminals? None of this is answered, though, because the prequel takes place before the city is completed and the main character is the daughter of one of the builders. The book ends just as it's about to get interesting: when, as an older woman, she is handed a baby and a new husband and sent underground.

I read the beginning and the end, and skipped the vast majority of the middle. Maybe I'll try again one day, but at the time I had the final book in the Ember series waiting for me, and there was no way I was going to wait to get back to the characters I loved in order to read a prequel that basically had nothing to do with the rest of the series.

I was quite engaged with this one and found myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. It really only slightly qualifies as a prequel, and a more traditional prequel about Ember's Builders would have been a more welcome addition to the series by most readers, I assume, but nonetheless I still enjoyed this book.

I wish it would have talked a little more about the making of ember.

Even if you like the Ember books you should skip this one. I had several problems with this book:

1. I was expecting some explanation of why and how the "Builders" decided to hide away a group of people for 200 years. This book instead is more of a stand alone story about a girl who happens to grow up the be the journal writer from City of Ember From this book we learn that it was built because of fear of war and the cave was in California. Two very trivial bits of info.

2. Jeanne DuPrau brings up several ideas then goes nowhere with them

a. Nickie receives coded messages from her father. Groves like to enter sweepstakes contests including some that involve solving puzzles. Do they collaborate together like Lina/Doone? Of course not! Instead at the end we get a very flip 'oh yeah I figured that out already' And really, her father risked sending a coded message and all it said was the name of the state he was in. How dumb.

b.Nickie's great-grandfather leaves a notebook with strange writing but despite all the time spent on it the writings are never explained. Again I was expecting to learn about the relationship of the great grandfather with McCoy. Perhaps even opening up a relationship with Nickie and McCoy.

c. Related to b., Hoyt McCoy is involved in something mysterious. The explanation if too strange and too short for something that appeared to be a major plot point. I really didn't get it. Did he really open up communication with aliens and that scared the "Phalanx Nations"???

3. Nickie is 11 years old and one of her goals is to fall in love. You have to be kidding me.

4. The overt anti-religious/political message was very off-putting for a YA book. The idea that the "Believers" in City of Ember were dumb/naive/gullible was an irritating side story but it is the major theme of this book.

Never been so disappointed in my life

I'm afraid that DuPrau has fallen into the all-too-common pattern of writing a series: great first book, a good second, by the third.... meh.

The real problem here is that this isn't an Ember book. It's billed as a prequel, but it's really a pre-pre-pre-prequel. I kept reading, waiting for this to all tie in somehow, but that doesn't happen until 2 pages from the end. Yes, 287 pages of waiting and anticipation just didn't cut it for me. What's more, the book is even more heavy-handed than its predecessors. I never ever would have read it without the tie-in (which I'm sure is why it's included as part of the series), and now I sort of wish I hadn't.

The main message is good - question authority, don't follow blindly, be wary of blind faith - and one I want children to take in, certainly. But you have to wade through a lot of obscure *stuff* to get there.

I enjoyed this story, although at times I found it a bit slow.

I think it put the dangers of blind acceptance and obedience to a self-proclaimed prophet, forced adherence of others to those who claim to speak for God, (and how not everyone who claims to speak for God actually does), in terms a child could easily relate to.

I think this could give kids good food for thought in a world where there are places where people live under this kind of religious tyranny today, even in some communities in the West, and there are those who strive to place the rest of us under it. And about the importance of thinking things through for yourself.

I am a conservative, and a Christian - so that you'll know I'm not just speaking here from a liberal and/or anti-Christian bias. The author may have been, I don't know. But I see much here that would be good for conservatives and Christians also to discuss with their children. And not only about false prophets, religious tyranny, but other totalitarian efforts as well, such as Nazism, etc.