Ember is different from all the others, an outcast, one who is feared or worshipped by the people in her own hometown.  Ember is golden.
     Mark Canter has created an exceptional heroine in his first novel, Ember from the Sun.  Paleoanthropologist Yute Nahadeh discovers Ember’s mother in a glacier in Alaska, preserved for 25,000 years in a supercooled state, her blood and organs still viable due to her eating certain arctic plants, animals, and insects containing proteins that acted as natural antifreeze.  Obsessed by the need to learn more about the Neanderthals, Yute removes an embryo from the woman’s body and transplants it into a young Indian woman.
     Raised by a loving family, Ember is from the beginning an exceptionally different child.  While her speech is delayed and distorted, her sense of smell equals that of a bloodhound’s.  Her skin has a golden glow, and as she grows, she discovers an energy flows from her that makes others mistrust or worship her.  From childhood onward she  dreams of a tribe of golden people who sleep the sleep of death rather than be killed by the warlike race pursuing them.  But she can find no one who looks like her, no heritage that she feels is her own, other than that of the goldens of her dreams.  And at last, suspecting she is the product of a genetic engineering experiment, she sets out to find her creator, Yute Nahadeh.
     Finding out the truth of her heritage sets Ember on another quest, an obsession as strong as the one that led Yute to bring her to life.  The novel’s pace accelerates as Ember follows her heart back to the place of her conception in an effort to find the goldens.  Mark Canter’s Ember from the Sun will hold you entralled while it warms your heart.

(Sample) Review submitted by Sarah Roberson
Mrs. Smith's 3rd period Sophomore English
January 5, 2000
book available at FHS Library (call # CAN)