Contest reminder. See details in yesterday’s post to learn how you may become eligible to win an ARC of The Diamond of Darkhold. The drawing will be held Thursday.
I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to discuss adults in The Diamond of Darkhold, Jeanne DuPrau’s latest book, fourth in the City of Ember series which the Children’s Book Blog Tour is featuring. Again I need to mention that, of necessity, there will be some spoilers, though I’ll keep them to a minimum as much as possible.
This series is actually a dystopian science fiction, though I’ve referred to it as a fantasy or a science fantasy. The differences are sometimes blurred, but fantasy generally relies on some kind of power apart from the natural and science fiction relies on seeing the world as it could become because of science. Both are “fantasies” in the sense that they portray the world or a world which does not now, nor did it ever, exist.
All that as background for the background of this post. 😉
Here’s where the spoilers come in. The city of Ember is an underground city established two hundred years before the events related in the first book of the series. Sometime around the middle of the twenty-first century, the world suffered a cataclysmic event. Those who foresaw what was about to take place built Ember as a place of refuge for the human race. In addition, they considered what the people would need when they emerged from their underground city, for emerge, they would, since their resources would run out after two hundred years.
As near as I can tell, not having read The City of Ember, the generation living when the city failed has no recollection of life above ground. In fact, they don’t seem to be aware they are living underground. They know how their city works and that it is failing, but why and what to do about it doesn’t seem to have been passed down to them.
Flash forward eight months to the time when The Diamond of Darkhold takes place. It is apparent that even those people living above ground are now ignorant of what the world once was. They don’t know what certain technology was for, have wrong-headed or complete ignorance of the history of the world, and have lost many of the skills, such as reading, which would allow them to learn.
But the thing is, the adults that lived through the catastrophe would have known all these things, yet they did not pass them on to their children. Or if they did, the importance of what they were teaching somehow became shaded, so the second generation Emberites didn’t consider it important enough to pass on to their children. Then, those third gen people had little knowledge, if any, to pass on to their kids—the people running Ember when it failed.
Fiction, you say. Just a made up story. Really? A similar failure to pass on vital information is recorded in the Bible:
All that generation also were gathered to their fathers, and there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel.
This, despite God’s clear instruction:
These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Not to mention, they had “stones of remembrance,” set up for the specific purpose of eliciting this question from their children: Dad, what are those stones? and thus opening up a discussion about what God did for Israel.
So there you have it—parents not passing on vital information to their children in fiction and parents not passing on vital information in history. The question then is, are we doing our part today to pass on vital information to the next generation? And what exactly is “vital”? Would the stuff we talk about most fall into that category?
Just something to think about.
Take a look at what others discussing The Diamond of Darkhold are saying on the tour hosted by Kidz Book Buzz:
01 Charger, the 160acrewoods, A Childhood of Dreams, All About Children’s Books, And Another Book Read, Becky’s Book Reviews, Book Review Maniac, Cafe of Dreams, Comox Valley Kids, Dolce Bellezza, Fireside Musings, Homeschool Buzz, Hyperbole, Looking Glass Reviews, Never Jam Today