What does best-selling authro Jeanne DuPrau think about the big-screen adaption of her first novel, “The City of Ember?”

“It’s visually marvelous, fast-paced and well-acted, though it seemed to me that some of the story’s power was sacrificed to speed and spectacle,” she told SciFi Wire. “The kids in the audience with me loved it. I’m looking forward to watching it several more times so that I can further appreciate it for itself as well as for its relation to my book.”

While she wrote the source material, DuPrau said she had very little input in realizing her work on the big-screen. She read a draft at an early stage and offered comments and feedback to the production team.

“After that, I learned about the progress of the film mostly through sources other than the filmmakers,” she said. “Some of the extras wrote to me about their experiences, and I checked IMDB.com now and then for clues,” she said.

“Recently, I met the director and had a good conversation with him. He has his own vision of the story, which is of course different from mine,” said DuPrau. “He has added things I wouldn’t have added and subtracted things I would have left in. But then I’m a writer, and he’s a filmmaker, and I know the two are different.”

Hopefully, the film sparked enough interest from movie-goers to send them back to the original novels.  The young-adult science-fiction series has been a best-seller for DuPrau and recently published the fourth and final installment.

“I didn’t have sequels in mind when I wrote ‘The City of Ember’; it was my editor who suggested a follow-up might be a good idea, so I wrote ‘The People of Sparks;,” DuPrau said. “The third book, ‘The Prophet of Yonwood‘, is a prequel, with a different setting and different characters, so the series felt incomplete to me without a return to the people of the original story. I wrote ‘The Diamond of Darkhold’to tell what happened to the characters and to the city and to tie together the various plot threads and themes from the other books.”