Soul Machine

Written and illustrated by Jordana Globerman

Annick Press

978-1-77321-959-2

228 pp.

Ages 12–16

June 2025 

 

In Chloe's world, souls are spun using wheels and the natural plant called breth. She and her family are in the business of soul making, though it's only her and her older sister Lacey since her father Morris left and her mother passed. And though Lacey still has to teach her younger sister all the steps to making souls, from getting the plants to spinning it, trimming it and packing it, Chloe has ambitions of becoming a CEO.

We just spin the threads, Chloe. As long as the mechanics of the soul remain a mystery, soul making stays an act of faith. (p. 8)

From Soul Machine, written and illustrated by Jordana Globerman

But their work has become more challenging. First, MCorp, a corporation led by Maya, a woman all aspire to be like, has been using a synthetic breth called Digibreth to make unlimited souls. Secondly, Lacey suspects that crops of breth are being poisoned by MCorp to force small businesses to become franchises of MCorp and weave Digibreth. Hoping to find a breth black market, Chloe heads to Metropolis, the busy city in which MCorp has its headquarters. There she is almost apprehended by the MCorp police for stealing but she is helped by Persie, one of the Nuspiritualist movement who protests against Maya and MCorp and works with others to heal and protect the natural breth.

From Soul Machine, written and illustrated by Jordana Globerman

Unbeknownst to Chloe, Maya has been watching Chloe and has her police follow her. As Maya and Persie travel towards the breth fields, including a stop at Paradise Found, a Digibreth test site where those test subjects promised spiritual optimization are now ghosts, Chloe becomes unwell. But when they reach their destination, parched and bereft of breth, Persie recognizes Chloe's father, from a photo in a locket, as the man who invented Digibreth.

 

While Persie is arrested, Chloe is taken to Maya. Maya, a cut-throat businesswoman, claims she  wants to help Chloe, asserting that she too needs Morris back as he is the only one who can fix the kinks in Digibreth. While Chloe appreciates the attention Maya pays her, she's starting to think there is much more to Maya's intentions, and she may be putting her family, both their business and their souls, at risk.

 

Soul Machine is Jordana Globerman's debut novel, and she's hit the scene with a powerful book of family and fantasy with a sampling of social commentary on choosing progress and celebrity over tradition and reliability. Chloe grapples with wanting success and fame but is challenged by what she sees in Maya and what she feels for her sister and family. In a society in which appearances are everything and better is best, Chloe is captivated, as many of our world are by popularity and fame. But Jordana Globerman has also given Chloe a soul that, when she must choose and act, she knows where her loyalties and her passions rest. And even though Maya sees the old world as deficient, she sees that as an opportunity for her.

"Your gen is all existential dread. It's a big market. (p. 110)

This new world has its own angst with the merging of state and self. The individual is becoming lost to those upheld as models of the best. Like many today, Maya is just capitalizing on it.

From Soul Machine, written and illustrated by Jordana Globerman

Jordana Globerman moves us through scenes of different atmospheres in Soul Machine with her colour choices, selecting one hue with different tints and shades for each set of circumstances. Metropolis and MCorp are all shown in pinks, perhaps reflecting those who see it all through rose-coloured glasses. The desolation of Paradise Found and the parched breth fields are depicted in a gold-puce-chartreuse. And home for Chloe and Lacey is teal. With her choice of colours and the strength of her illustrations that offer softness and harshness as appropriate, Jordana Globerman makes the reader think about our own society and the choices we make for ourselves and others. While many may not think about the metaphysics reflected in Soul Machine, Jordana Globerman actually presents opportunities to contemplate and discuss self and society, time and space, and reality as a whole—she appends her novel with "Questions with No Wrong Answers"—proving that her graphic novel, like many of other creators, is not "just" a comic book.

The Almost Truth

by Eileen Cook
Simon Pulse
978-1-4424-4019-7
248 pp.
Ages 14+
2012

Sadie has big plans.  Now that she's finished high school, she's determined to leave her trailer park life on Bowton Island and head to Berkley to study architecture.  Although she's most upset about leaving her best friend, the very hot Brendan, she's been saving her money–often from small cons she pulls, as learned from her father who is currently in jail–and finally has enough.  That is, until her mother, a hotel maid who is always pinching pennies, guiltlessly tells Sadie that she took it for Dad's lawyer.  (Nice parents, eh?)

A poster of a three-year-old child, Ava McKenna, who went missing 15 years earlier gives Sadie an idea for a con that would help her get the money she needs for school.  The wealthy McKenna family who is offering $250,000 for information about Ava's disappearance from the island is slated to attend a big fundraising event for their McKenna's Children's Foundation and Sadie, with Brendan's help and information she gleans from hotel staff, devises a way to get close to the family.

While working to insinuate herself close to Chase Parker, the young man in charge of organizing the charity event, Sadie finds herself at a crossroads with Brendan and navigating her own family obstacles, including her mother who has difficulties with the truth.

For years I thought I was going crazy, since I didn't remember all these things, but then I realized she just made them up.  Cut out any parts of her life she didn't like and squished in a new and better memory to fill the gap. (pg. 59)

The mystery of what happened to little Ava becomes wrapped up in Sadie's desire to know herself better, though she's running from Brendan and can't trust her parents to think about anyone but themselves.

Though the reader might be chagrined by some too-obvious coincidences, the story of Ava McKenna's disappearance is a true mystery that is not solved until the very end, so don't be so sure that you've got the whole truth at any time before then.  Often the truth is tailored for those receiving it and can be interpreted far too many ways.  The Almost Truth makes it clear that sometimes the truth is hidden by a strong desire to make that truth a reality, rather than as a result of omission or outright lies.  But when untruths are piled upon untruths by different parties, it is vey difficult to discern the truth under the burden of imagined realities.  

Having previously reviewed Eileen Cook's Unraveling Isobel (Simon Pulse, 2012), I knew I could expect a well-crafted plot that involved some mystery, romance and teen angst, but I was impressed by the depth of the plotting in The Almost Truth.  While I wondered why Sadie could not see how much Brendan cared for her–I suspect that this is not unusual among teens–and I was convinced that the solution to Ava's disappearance was obvious, I soon realized that there was much more to the story.  And that's because Eileen Cook has established characters who choose to see circumstances that work best with their own interpretations and that become their reality.  They're not living lies, at least they don't all know they are, but they're working with the reality they see.  It can be confusing and sometimes you want to shake one of them and yell, "Don't you see it?" but it wouldn't do any good.  The Almost Truth demonstrates that sometimes the almost truth is the only truth there is, until one person pulls out a single truth that allows the burden of imagined realities to collapse.