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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.
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.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published August 4, 1972
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 24, 2021
Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...
"Irene Schram’s near-future (?) shocker Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down (1972) subjects a fifth-grade class and their teacher to a terrifying series of violent travails at the hands of emotionless men. Told mostly from the perspective of the young students who write their thoughts in a school notebook, Schram [...]"
"Irene Schram’s near-future (?) shocker Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down (1972) subjects a fifth-grade class and their teacher to a terrifying series of violent travails at the hands of emotionless men. Told mostly from the perspective of the young students who write their thoughts in a school notebook, Schram [...]"
December 12, 2010
This was a weird book, I also found this one at a thrif shop. It's about this class that was out for a picnic lunch, and the ashes from the buildings came down on them so they went to find a different place to sit and eat. They come across this house that looks warm and inviting and abandoned so they go in. Soon after the whole class and the teacher are "kidnapped" by men in black and taken prison at this random place like a hotel, and one by one the kids die. There were like 12 of them at first and at the end of the book theres maybe 4 or 5? It's so horrible I couldn't believe it when I was reading it, it's very.. disturbing.. I don't think I could read it again, but I did read it all the way through because I wanted to know what was going to happen next who was going to die who was going to live, and find out if they ever got out of there. This is an older book writen in the 70s I think it took place in the 50s-60s? Maybe even earlier than that.
October 25, 2020
I did a little research, and this is often read as a thin political allegory. I experienced it as a series of terrible things that happen to people for no reason, with very little symbolism. Absolute bleakness.
May 16, 2019
My dad bought this book for me when I was in 5th grade. I thought it must be school-related, and neither of us read the blurbs or checked the contents.
In a polluted future, a elementary school class goes with their teacher to a tiny park for an outing. They're captured and put into a building. The teacher tries to keep them to together and alive but the guards/captors seem determined to make the children kill themselves or others inadvertently (like panicking and pushing someone off a staircase). The book ends ambivalently. I thought it was great when I first read it. Finally tracking it down again as an adult, the writing's not very good and the overall story has problems.
In a polluted future, a elementary school class goes with their teacher to a tiny park for an outing. They're captured and put into a building. The teacher tries to keep them to together and alive but the guards/captors seem determined to make the children kill themselves or others inadvertently (like panicking and pushing someone off a staircase). The book ends ambivalently. I thought it was great when I first read it. Finally tracking it down again as an adult, the writing's not very good and the overall story has problems.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews