FINISHED:

DuPrau, Jeanne. (2003). The city of Ember. New York: Random House.

[Been on my radar for a while now and finally picked it up and read it after I saw that the movie version is on its way. I was sucked in from the VERY FIRST PAGE. The introduction begins with a whiz-BANG premise: some "builders" construct an underground city with artificial light and say that the people who live there should be able to survive for over 200 years. They put some "instructions" into a sealed box that will open by itself in 225 years or so, and entrust the box to the first mayor of the city, telling her that she needs to pass it down to successive mayors without telling anyone else about it. The 7th mayor contracts a deadly disease and tries to break the box open, hoping that it will contain a cure for his disease, but dies before he can open it, and before he can tell anyone else about it. The box, a la "Raiders of the Lost Ark", gets pushed into the back of a closet and opens itself many years down the road. FASCINATING. While the book occasionally looses momentum, the beginning and end are pretty darn exciting, with the last page ending in such a major cliffhanger that I HAD to get books 2 & 3 of the series from the library today.]

STARTED:

Clifford, Eth. (1979) Help! I'm a prisoner in the library. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

[A quick classic that I've never read.]