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. The earlier books aren't on these shelves yet, and this one opens with armies already gathered, friends already lost and a promise made generations ago about to come due. Your reader will follow it, but they'll be meeting people at their last battle rather than their first.

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

Finish it and still want more from this author? Jack Zulu and the Waylander's Key swaps talking rabbits for a boy in small-town West Virginia in 1984 who finds a gate hiding a city that sits between twelve realms, and who has to work out where he actually belongs.