I popped into HPB last weekend to get some haunting new reads, and I found The Ghost of Graylock by Dan Poblocki and Engines of the Broken World by Jason Vanhee. If anyone knows me, they knew how much I loved The Haunting of Gabriel Ashe by Dan Poblocki, and I have made it my personal mission to get all of his books! Seeing this in the store was an automatic buy. As for the other one, I'm in love with the premise and I cannot wait to start it. I am in the middle of a Kingdom Keepers reread, since I finally got my hands on book six, but after that I plan on reading these two lovelies!

This book has a strange, dreamlike quality that is entirely intentional. After their mother dies, a brother and sister live alone in the wilderness with a strange cat-like creature that spouts out spiritual advice as a reality-obliterating fog encroaches upon them. This is part dystopia, part-post-apocalyptic, part parallel world, part zombie/ghost story, part religious meditation -- and with all these disparate parts, perhaps it's not surprising that the book does none of them particularly well.

I think the biggest disappointment about this book, for me, was that for a book about a mother's corpse that is reanimated after her children stash it under the table (the ground is too frozen for them to bury her), the creep factor is just not what it should be. As soon as her reason for returning becomes known, it almost disappears entirely -- although there is some gore and creepy descriptions afterward that would probably keep the story consistently scary in a visual medium.

The plot felt a little spotty to me, and although the book was well written, the attempt at an uneducated, pioneer-like dialect was sometimes grating. I also wasn't really sure that it made sense for the people in this world to talk that way, but I suppose you could make up an explanation for it if you thought hard enough. The ending was a bit of a let-down, which more-or-less means it kept the same tone as the rest of the book. It's the sort of book where the ending could have made or broke it, but this ending is just sort of ... there.

Although far better than a lot of books I've given only 3 stars, it's nothing too special in an already crowded genre.

There are some books that are a bit difficult to review, because all you want to do is talk about THAT ONE THING, except that THAT ONE THING is intensely spoilery, and you don’t want to spoil anything. (See: Code Name Verity.) Engines of the Broken World is one of these books, which means I’ll be dancing around what I really want to say the whole time.

And I really don’t want to give you all plot summary, either. I had a vague sense of setting when I went in and not much else. So all I’ll say is that there’s a girl named Merciful and her world is ending in ice, in fog, with a whimper.

Oh, and the first half of this book is one of the scariest things I’ve ever read. It’s not horror, in the sense of Stephen King or Rick Yancey. It’s not even exactly the “something’s about to jump out at you” kind of scary. Instead, it’s quiet, chilling, insidious. Bad things happen, and there’s a sense of something not quite right. And then you hit a particular page and stop halfway through, because something there didn’t add up and then you flip back frantically to confirm your suspicions. And all the time, the world is shrinking, quite literally.

Merciful, being in the world, doesn’t see all of this as clearly; she can’t flip back to earlier chapters and confirm her suspicions. But because her voice is strong and beautifully written, I never felt annoyed with her for being dense. Scared for her, yes, because if she doesn’t figure it out, terrible things are going to happen. Scared for her, because they’re happening anyway.

Now, for me, the middle third or so of the book didn’t quite work for me–the pacing slowed down a bit and there was a lot of new information that didn’t quite fit together smoothly. There were still some genuinely horrifying and arresting scenes, and Merciful’s voice is so strong that she carried me though it. But I also wasn’t quite as sure about the way religious themes were used in this section, and how they fit with the world that had been so amazingly drawn earlier.

But then the ending–oh, the ending. Wow. Pitch perfect, gorgeously written, able to take a piece of text that has been used so often that it is almost bare of meaning and somehow make it so emotionally affective that I cried my way through it. I finished and thought, “This is how you end a book.”

Despite its unevenness, this one is gutsy and beautiful. I highly recommend it for the evocative setting and the characters, especially Merciful. And I will definitely keep an eye out for whatever Vanhee writes next.

Book source: public library
Book information: 2013, Henry Holt & Co; upper mg/YA (for the middle grade kid who doesn’t mind some violence & scariness)