Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

Our whole class of students was on the grass, in the park, for a picnic: it was April and time for a picnic after a long winter full of weeks and months of rain, boring rain. From this innocent opening Irene Schram builds a terrifying tale about a concentration camp for children. Like William Golding's Lord of the Flies, with which it will undoubtedly be compared, Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down creates an extreme situation—half nightmare, half history—to reveal the anxieties and terrors of children growing up today. The children are fifth-graders in a typical city; they are forced by a storm of pollution to take shelter in a park building, where they are captured, then transported and imprisoned, by robot-like guards. Their struggle to survive in their new environment—which has many parallels to the world they are growing up in—is told mainly through the children's eyes and imaginations. Ashes, Ashes is a spell-binding fantasy that is based on the real lessons city children must absorb daily from their immediate surroundings (drugs, welfare hotels, pollution, random terror, abandonment) and from the menacing world beyond it, where geography is blight and hunger, and arithmetic is body counts. This is a novel about how children perceive, struggle against, and adjust to the nightmare of our history.