Soul Machine by Jordana Globerman
Annick Press (June 17, 2025)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Jordana Globerman is a comic book writer and illustrator based in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a Masters in Visual Arts from the University of the Arts London in England, where she majored in drawing anthropomorphic bears and drinking tea the proper way. Her newest book is Soul Machine, a YA-oriented graphic novel of science fiction horror.
Chloe and her older sister make souls by hand in an empty old house in the countryside. When their supply of breth — the raw material needed to make souls — runs dry, the evil MCorp tries to force them to franchise and make synthetic souls instead. Chloe sets out to the big city in hopes of finding a new source. And maybe a way to modernize their business that Lacey is so determined to keep in the past. On a journey to M-tropolis to find a new source of breth untouched by MCorp’s greedy hands, Chloe discovers an underground rebellion which leads to her uncovering some deep-hidden family secrets.
The plot of this book starts out dark and gets darker. In what is essentially framed as a luddite-versus-corporations plot, rather than milling and spinning cotton or wool, the family business is to create new souls from a plant. The corporation, MCorp, is creating a synthetic alternative and shuttering all the sources of breth, so post-apocalyptic ideas are established within the first few pages. However, when readers are forced to consider what a soul is, and how one would test a sythetic soul, and what happens to the failures of those experiments, the story gets deeply and darkly metaphysical.
Soul Machine starts out as a fantastic post-apocalyptic tale akin to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, but then delves into a more darkly mythic direction, similar to Agamemnon and Iphigenia. All of this is couched in the science-fiction of a corporately-ruled nightmare dystopia.
Overall, Soul Machine is a great technological horror novel for YA readers. There’s enough here to fear, as there is in any post-apocalyptic books involving children, but it’s couched in a way that it seems both plausible as well as discussible. Furthermore, the focus on technology and the lack of a human connection adds discussion topics for parents and teachers. This book is strongly recommended for readers of sci-fi horror or post-apocalyptic horror, but anyone who enjoys dark graphic novels will be sure to fall under its spell.
