Yzabel / October 6, 2013

Engines of the Broken World by Jason Vanhee

My rating: [rating=4]

(I got an ARC ebook copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

Summary:

Merciful Truth and her brother, Gospel, have just pulled their dead mother into the kitchen and stowed her under the table. It was a long illness, and they wanted to bury her—they did—but it’s far too cold outside, and they know they won’t be able to dig into the frozen ground. The Minister who lives with them, who preaches through his animal form, doesn’t make them feel any better about what they’ve done. Merciful calms her guilty feelings but only until, from the other room, she hears a voice she thought she’d never hear again. It’s her mother’s voice, and it’s singing a lullaby. . . .

Review:

This book left me with an odd feeling, but in a good way: the kind of feeling you cannot define, that puts you at unease, yet that at the same time keeps you enthralled and fascinated. The story is wrapped in a definite atmosphere of raw despair and claustrophobia, and its characters, although bleak-looking at first, become easier to understand chapter after chapter. Merciful is a  simple girl who’s led a simple life in a simple place, under the guidance of her mother and the Minister; Gospel, her elder brother, tries to be The Man in the family, although he is only three years older and is still a scared child in some ways. Their only comfort, after their mother’s death and even before that, is the Minister itself, and that is to say a lot, since it’s not even a human being they’re dealing with, but an animal.

While you hope until the end that everything will be fully resolved, there’s that nagging little voice in you that keeps saying “it cannot end well”; part of you wants to ignore it, and part of you wants it to be right, because every element—that lost, backward village, its few remaining inhabitants, the mysterious fog, the setting itself—almost screams for it. In a way, it is terrifying. In another, it is alright. You might never know what really happened, how it really ended, if it really ended… but somehow, it’s alright. And I wouldn’t have wanted it to be otherwise.

I also liked how the author managed to toy with the minds of his characters, by also toying with the reader’s mind. More than once I wondered if I had read too fast, if I hadn’t paid attention enough to this or that detail, or if maybe I had put a finger on a plot hole; then, a few chapters later, it all made sense again, and I realised I had been fooled—again, in a good way.

My biggest qualm, I think, would be that the characters weren’t fast enough when it came to understanding a specific turning point in the plot, and might have been able to understand sooner the whole deal about the machine. But at the same time… could they? Considering the life they had been leading until now, and their present circumstances, wasn’t it normal for them to be a little slow on the taking? I can’t make a proper decision about that. All things considered, I enjoyed this book no matter what.