Amanda Jay won the Fairway award for best work of fiction, in the recently concluded Fairway Awards ceremony. Then a fellow reader, recommended it as a good steam-punk novel - not being into science fiction, I had to look up what that genre was. Upon looking it up, it reminded me of the earlier series of Mad Max, and also a movie called "Hardware" I watched decades back. The fact that a Sri Lankan author has written a book on a genre that we are largely unused to, and that she has won an award for same, plus the recommendation of the said reader, gave me enough reason to invest in a Kindle version of the book.
At the outset it has to be said , that it was a page turner, and more than half of it was read while commuting to and from work. The plot is fantastic, and the world building is intriguing. The science behind the fiction, has not been really spent much time on - yet, that has minimal effect on the build up of the worlds which instill a sense of desperation and hopelessness - which appear to be the author's goal. For more than half of the way the author succeeds in keep the reader guessing, speeding through the pages as she tries to find out how such things came to pass after a blissful love affair between Ezra and Kaelyn.
Yet, from such a sense of desperation, things work out for everyone - except the single character who perished earlier - to a most hopeful ending. For me personally, I found it too hopeful, and I felt the end could've been better plotted. I couldn't rid a sense of the "Bollywood" as all the main players moved in at the final scene to clear out the doubts. The characters too were rather flat, and even the ones promising to be complex ones end up being "well meaning folk trying too desperately." Amidst all that criticism, the scale tilts in favour of Amanda, for her brave work in an unusual genre, coming out with a top class fiction, for most of the way. Accolades that you received
were well deserved, and my you go from strength to Strength, Amanda !
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