Alindarka's Children: Things Will Be Bad
SynopsisPlot
It’s not Avi’s fault, it’s those sourish, mind-bending little berries that are to blame, those tiny wee spheres. Bilberries, bletherberries that befuddle the mind, babbleberries that give you a kick. The beautiful green forest scales, the timber songs, play out like a kaleidoscope before his eyes. In a camp at the edge of a forest children are trained to forget their language through drugs, therapy, and coercion. Alicia and her brother Avi are rescued by their father, but they give him the slip and set out on their own. In the forest they encounter a cast of villains: the hovel-dwelling Granmaw, the language-traitor McFinnie, the border guard and murderer Bannock the Bogill, and a wolf.
Story
About this book
In a camp at the edge of a forest, children are subjected to drugs, therapy, and coercion designed to make them forget their own language. Among them are Alicia and her brother Avi, whose perceptions blur under the influence of small berries that warp the mind. Their father manages to rescue them from the camp, but the two children slip away from him and venture into the forest on their own.
What follows is a dark, fairy-tale-shaped encounter with a series of threatening figures. The forest holds Granmaw, who lives in a hovel, a character called McFinnie who has betrayed his own language, a border guard named Bannock the Bogill who is also a murderer, and a wolf. The landscape shifts between natural beauty and menace, with timber songs and green scales playing out like a kaleidoscope through Avi's altered vision.
Alhierd Bacharevic is a Belarusian writer, and this novel is described as his first book to appear in English. Language suppression sits at the centre of the story, set against a landscape where borders, forests, and adults with authority each pose distinct dangers to children trying to keep hold of words they have been ordered to forget.
