I wish I had not been told that this book was the prequel to The City of Ember. Actually, maybe it is okay that I knew, but it sent me into this really funny sort of expectant state. The novel is good and certainly DuPrau shows her ability to deal with reality just as well as her quasi-utopian giver-esque world. (And points for actually connecting the worlds.)

I was just so confused when I was twenty pages from the end of the novel and still had not figured out the connection from this book, to the first in the series. And actually although I was uneasy for two hundred pages, I think I have decided that I love this.