Ember’s End

S. D. Smith's Ember's End is the last book of the Green Ember series, a rabbit war story for 8 year olds where absolutely everything is on the line.

What happens

Start here and you'll be reading the end of something. That's worth saying first. This one opens with armies already gathered, friends already lost and a promise made generations ago about to come due. The three books before it are on these shelves now, so a reader who starts at the beginning will meet these rabbits at their first battle rather than their last.

It opens with a prince on a smoking mountain, telling his captain to bury a great threat and their best weapon against it in the same ground. What if the worst happens, the captain asks. Then one of my line will remember, says the prince. And he will rise.

Centuries later, Jo Shanks is crawling through the trees at the edge of an enemy camp with a quiver of arrows he's frightened to jostle, because the heads have little flint-and-fire mechanisms in them and he'd rather not blow himself up.

What makes the Green Ember books what they are is the bit that comes next. A guard the size of a barn takes off his helmet, has a good scratch, checks nobody is watching, and starts dancing and singing a song about how nimble his limbs are. Jo's mouth falls open. His friends have to drag him away.

That's the balance all through. Chivalry, banners, oaths sworn in proper old-fashioned words, and then a rabbit doing a little dance in the dark.

A word about the fighting. These rabbits are at war and the book does not pretend otherwise. There are swords and arrows and rabbits who die, some of them off the page and some of them close to it. Jo takes an arrow in the side. A character the earlier books ask you to love is reported killed, and the grief is real and unhurried.

It isn't gruesome and there's no relish in it. But if your reader is the sort who needs everybody to be all right, this one will hurt them, and I'd hold it back a while.

What to read next

If your reader hasn't met Heather and Picket yet, go back to the first book, The Green Ember. It starts with the two of them playing Starseek in the tall grass outside their elm-tree home, a star flung on a scarlet ribbon, Picket scared of heights and Heather teasing him for it, and it ends its first chapters with the wolves at the door.