I thoroughly enjoyed reading The City of Ember. The storyline follows the standard tale of adolescent children who are brave and smart enough to try and solve their people’s problem. Even though the story has that same skeletal structure, the plot itself is more unique. This book is geared towards readers in the age range of the main characters, 12 years old, but I found the novel interesting enough to read in a matter of days.

There is a good amount of suspense and mystery that could provide critical and creative thinking for the young readers; as well as the possibly of gaining bravery from the main characters. I felt like there were many words that would help broaden the young reader’s vocabularies as well. The story has some good depth to it, but some of the bumps in the journey are solved relatively easily—but that is to be expected for a story for this age group. There are three more books in the series, and the end of this book left me with a desire to read the second one. There are no inappropriate parts of the story that I would be embarrassed for young people to read. I think The City of Ember is a great book and would recommend it to anyone; it’s a good story and would be an enjoyable read for many different age groups.

I would have preferred having the main characters be in their early 20’s as opposed to 12-year-olds; I felt that would have made the story seem more realistic, but that’s not the age group it was intended for, nor is it necessarily realistic.