Heather's Library

Ember Series #3
The Prophet of Yonwood
by Jeanne DuPrau



p.26-27 The president ended with his usual sentence: “Let us pray to God for the safety of our people and the success of our endeavors.” Nickie always wondered about this. The idea seemed to be that if you prayed extremely hard--especially if a lot of people prayed at once--maybe God would change things. The trouble was, what if your enemy was praying to? Which prayer would God listen to?

p.28 This is how Nickie was: she wanted to know about everybody and everything--not just encyclopedia-type information, but ordinary things like what people did at their jobs and what their houses looked like inside and what they talked about. When she passed two or three people walking together on the street, she always hoped to catch an intriguing bit of conversation, like “I found her lying there dead!” Or “...and he left that very day without telling a soul and was never seen again!” But almost always, all she heard were the dull, connecting bits of the conversation, things like “And so I said to her...” and “Yeah, I think so too,” and “So it’s really kind of like...” And by the time they said whatever came next, they were out of earshot.


p.57-58 As soon as Amanda had gone off with Mrs. Beeson, Nickie found a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote down these words: Sinners. Wrongness. Forces of evil. Shield of goodness. Those were the things to remember. It was so perfect--she could accomplish her Goal #3 by helping to battle the forces of evil and build the shield of goodness. Just the very words made her feel like a warrior. Maybe she should give something up, the way everyone else was. If she did, would she have more love to give to God? She thought probably her love for God was a little weak, since she didn’t know much about him and hadn’t really thought about whether she loved him or not. It was hard to love someone invisible that you’d never met.

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Ember Series #1
The City of Ember
by Jeanne DuPrau

p.34 Lina sat in the big armchair and waited. No one came. She got up and wandered around the room. She bent over The Book of the City of Ember and read a few sentences: “The citizens of Ember may not have luxuries, but the foresight of the Builders, who filled the storerooms at the beginning of time, has ensured that they will always have enough, and enough is all that a person of wisdom needs.”

p.34-35 She flipped a few pages. “The Gathering Hall clock,” she read, “measures the hours of night and day. It must never be allowed to run down. Without it, how would we know when to work and when to go to school? How would the light director know when to turn the lights on and when to turn the lights off again? It is the job of the timekeeper to wind the clock every week and to place the date sign in Harken Square every day. The timekeeper must perform these duties faithfully.”
     Lina knew that not all timekeepers were faithful as they should be. She’d heard of one, some years ago, who often forgot to change the date sign, so that it might say, “Wednesday, Week 38, Year 227” for several days in a row. There had even been timekeepers who forgot to wind the clock, so that it might stand at noon or at midnight for hours at a time, causing a very long day or a very long night. The result was that no one really knew anymore exactly what day of the week it was, or exactly how many years it had been since the building of the city--they called this year 241, but it might have been 245 or 239 or 250. As long as the clock’s deep boom rang out every hour, and the lights went on and off more or less regularly, it didn’t seem to matter.”

p.50 “bald as a peeled potato”

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Little Sister Tai Mi
by Berit Braeme

p.17-18 Korea is the name of the country where Tai-Mi lives, but the people there call it "the country where it is silent in the morning," so we will call it that too.
     It is a lovely country. It has high mountains and green valleys, there is snow there in the winter, and it has sea all around it.
     The people who live there have slanting eyes and smooth black hair. They are very like the Chinese. The food they eat is quite different from the food we eat. Instead of bread they eat rice, and the th ing they like best for dinner is vegetables cut up into tiny pieces with sugar, salt, mustard, and vinegar. They call that food "kimtshikk."
     Their houses are also different from ours--at any rate, the houses out in the country and in the tiny country villages. The whole family--father, mother, children, grandfather and grandmother, uncles and aunts--live together in square houses with straw roofs and a little yard in the middle. They have a large kitchen, which they all share, and then they each have their own rooms along the four sides of the house.
     Inside the rooms there is almost no furniture, only some low tables, for they sit on the floor when they eat, and therefore they all take off their shoes when they come in so that the floor will not get dirty. During the day all the children play in the yard or out in the fields, and at night they sleep on thick mats, which they roll out on the floor.
     Now you can perhaps imagine the sort of home Tai-Mi had and what she looked like. She was small and neat, with slanting eyes and black, silky smooth hair. Her skin was soft as velvet. Her name suited her very well, for Mi means "the good and the pretty," and good and pretty she certainly was. As a matter of fact, Tai-Mi had three names. She was called Tai-Mi Ja. Tai was her surname, Mi her Christian name, and Ja the name of the tribe to which she belonged, for that is the custom in an Oriental country. But we will just call her Tai-Mi, which easier to say and remember.

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