The Hunger Games meets The Eden Project in Victoria Williamson’s debut YA novel Feast of Ashes. This author already has an outstanding collection of MG novels to her name, and now has turned her craft to the YA market with a breathtaking work of speculative fiction, which is all the more hard-hitting for the elements of real world scientific experimentation that form its hinterland.
I totally engaged with this story, recounted by sixteen-year-old Adina, facing up to her guilt for the death of 14, 756 people which she starkly confesses in the opening paragraph. Big themes are related at human scale through the voice of this brilliantly written, flawed, main protagonist as we see her story unfold from the temptation of an apple leading to the fall of the only civilisation that she has known in her short life. Adina is smart but lazy and easily distracted by her own interests which leads to her slacking from her duties on the maintenance crew of Eden Five, the self-contained biodome which shelters a small population from the barren wastes of an African landscape one hundred years in the future.
The greed and corruption of global industry has laid waste to a continent, where now the few human survivors live in strictly regimented, enclosed, geographically isolated, artificial biospheres. Everyone has a role to play to maintain survival and very few know the truth of the factors which have led to their highly regulated, artificial habitat. Adina is far more interested in pursuing her own enjoyments: crushing on handsome planter Otienno; hanging out with best friend Dejen in his laboratory and finding contraband for her little sister Tash, than she is in carrying out the jobs on her maintenance roster…with potentially disastrous consequences! The growth of Adi’s character through her story arc, as she reflects on her behaviour towards others, is a strong element of this novel.
I enjoyed the clever construction of this story, the first half of the novel is a countdown to an explosive flexion point and the second half charts each of the days that a small group of survivors battle to survive the desolate plains and the genetically mutated Nomalies that roam the wasted landscape. Without wishing to give away too much of the plot, sharp-eyed readers of the novel will spot that the Amonston Corporation which claims credit for feeding the world is in fact an anagram of a well-known former agrochemical company, and the chief scientist Doctor Malathion will give further clues to the nature of the environmental disaster at play here. I think that teens, who in my experience, are very switched on to the ecological disasters being caused by corporate greed and short-sighted political decisions, will be gripped by this tense, race against the clock, eco-thriller.
Victoria Williamson has spent time teaching in Malawi and still supports a literacy charity there: CharChar Literacy, to which she will be donating 20% of her author royalties from this book. I am grateful to Neem Tree Press for sending me a review copy of Feast of Ashes and to @The_WriteReads for inviting me to join the blog tour. Do check out the other blog posts in the schedule below.
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