In this prequel to the City of Ember, a girl named Nickie has come to the small North Carolina town of Yonwood with her aunt so that they can get her great-grandfather’s house ready to sell. At the same time, the United States is teetering at the end of war with an unnamed enemy (it’s a made up name, so I guess that makes this book set in the future, though there’s no noticeable future-ness to the setting).
At the same time, one of the locals falls ill, and has a vision of a terrible future, and while the others in town try to interpret what that vision means against the wider backdrop of what’s going on in the world, bad things happen.
This is definitely a commentary on the human propensity to go way overboard with self-righteousness. Nickie tries to do the right thing throughout the book, and that comes back to bite her several times.
The story doesn’t really have much to do with Ember, except that certain characters will eventually have something to do with that underground city about fifty years after the action of this book.