The Profit of Yonwood by Jeanne Duprau

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The Profit of Yonwood
by Jeanne Duprau
(Audio)

This wasn’t at all what I was expecting from the third book in the Ember series. It’s a prequel, but it wasn’t the prequel I had been expecting. Instead of explaining about the apocalyptic event that made it necessary for the City of Ember to be built in the first place, it follows the life of a young girl, Nickie, spending some time in a small (but kooky) town.

Nickie makes a list of goals—to figure out how to stay in the big mansion her family had inherited and intended to sell, fall in love, and do something good for the world—and sets out to make them happen.

Yonwood is not the tiny little town it seems at first to be. There is a woman who seems to be seeing into the future, to a time when the world is in trouble. She isn’t lucid and isn’t able to properly communicate. And no one really knows what she’s seeing or trying to say. But her friend declares to everyone that she is a profit and is able to tell people what to do to be safe and survive any future disaster.

The profit’s instructions as her friend interprets them are bizarre and sometimes pretty stupid: no sin, no lights, no dogs. The story adopts heavy religious themes, assuming that the visions and advice were coming from God. So “sin” is defined in those terms by the profit’s friend. People found to be doing wrong are given loud bracelets and treated as outcasts.

The people of the town are interesting and a little crazy as well. There’s a young boy who is fascinated with snakes. There’s a girl who is into reading romance novels and doesn’t have anywhere to live. And there’s a seemingly crazy man who shoots beams of light up at the sky in the middle of the night and threatens anyone who ventures onto his property.

Nickie finds herself in the midst of all of this, not knowing what to make of it at first. She wants to do good and thinks that maybe the way to do that is to look around for things that feel wrong to her. She also ends up with a dog she keeps secret from her aunt, who doesn’t like dogs. So when the profit’s command seems to be “no dogs” she knows she has to do something in order to keep her dog.

Of course, she finally gets through to the profit and wakes her up, to find that the woman wasn’t giving advice, only trying to communicate what she saw in her mind—a terrible world where there were no birds, no songs, no dogs, etc.

The ending is a somewhat happy one, even though Nickie doesn’t complete two of her three goals. The summary at the end of what happens at the future was a little halting for me. I felt like I wanted to see it happening, not be told about it. And I didn’t understand what in the world any of this had to do about the City of Ember series because the big war that seemed to be building throughout the entire book ended up not even happening. It seemed completely strange and pointless, though it was nice to find out what happened to the characters in the future.

Then, at the very end, we find out that Nickie was one of the people chosen to venture into the City of Ember, which her father helped build. In fact, she is the one who writes the note that Lina and Doon find in the first book! All of this was also way too quick for me. It was very neat, but after such a long story that didn’t seem to connect to anything, I really wanted to find out more about this part of the character’s history that actually was relevant! Instead, we’re just told about it and left to match the bit up with the note from the first book.

I didn’t love this story, but after finishing the fourth book, I understand now why it was included in the series. It’s a bit of a stretch and seemed too simple or predictable. As a whole, it’s an entertaining story, but in this series, I prefer the stories with Doon and Lina more than this one.