The Prophet of Yonwood

#413
Title: The Prophet of Yonwood
Author: Jeanne DuPrau
Publisher: Yearling
Year: 2007
289 pages

As in The People of Sparks, here we see well-intentioned but rigid people make things worse and inadvertently threaten their community while attempting to protect it.

The third volume in the Ember series is a prequel, though nominally so: We learn at the end what protagonist Nickie's relationship is to Ember, and the terms for Lina's visions of the magnificent city are set by the Prophet's vision and subsequent speculations about nearby parallel universes. Other than that, the novel is reasonably self-contained, and other than a few pages at the end that fast-forward to the Ember period, it could stand alone. I would argue that it should have been allowed to do so; a prequel that's thematically related but has a separate plot is a much more interesting proposition. However, I'm not the target audience, and I can't say whether I'd have liked a prequel that separate when I was 8-12 years old.