Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for Feast of Ashes, the first title in an incredible dystopian Young Adult series from award-winning author Victoria Williamson.
I’ve had the pleasure of reading four of the author’s middle grade titles, all of which I have enjoyed and all of which have been very different from one another. When I was offered the chance to read and review this, her first novel aimed at a Young Adult audience, I jumped at the chance and I am very glad that I did. An original and bleak vision of the world 100 years from now, this is a read which is tense and thought-provoking, with the biggest of twists at the end, and is based on the terrifying idea of industry’s greed bringing about an environmental catastrophe, the like of which we could so very easily head towards.
There are very few books that start with a confession, but here our narrator Adina opens with the admission that she has killed 14,756 people before going back a week to a time when those unfortunate souls were still very much alive. Then, her main thoughts were avoiding completing the work for which she was responsible and loitering within the Gardens to eye up hot young worker Otienno. Caught slacking again, Adina is threatened with being sent outside Eden Five – the self-contained ecosystem built by the Amonston Corporation within which she lives – to carry out a maintenance job in the heavily polluted world outside, the prospect of which does not appeal.
Over the next few days, Adina continues to shirk work, heading off at every opportunity to visit best friend Dejen, who tells her how hugely frustrated he is at her lack of interest in the history of the world that came before the advent of the Gardens. With her mind on trying to fix her parents’ relationship and spoiling younger sister Tash, Adina fritters away her canteen credits and enjoys life as best she can until the outcome of a job she has failed to complete causes a huge explosion which sends fire through Eden Five. Fortunate enough to be close to the airlock that provides an exit to the outside world, Adina and Tash, together with Dejen, Otienno, and fellow inhabitants Chiku, Baba and his dog manage to scramble out into the barren wastelands that surround their now-destroyed home.
With time to grab only the most basic of survival equipment on their way out, the small group decides to try to head for the Sanctuary but none of them has reckoned on the challenges they will face on their journey. With the land heavily contaminated and water scarce, they will have to carefully ration their supplies but there are greater dangers awaiting them within the wastelands – not just the twisted and mutated Nomalies which will hunt them but also the fellow humans they will encounter. As Adina tries to master the guilt which consumes her for being responsible for destroying Eden Five, can she do so before she reveals what she has done to the others, or – worse still – they work it out for themselves…
Like so many teenagers, Adina’s main priority is to have fun and not motivated by the responsibilities she has in her role within Eden Five, she does the bare minimum that she feels she can get way with to spend her time chatting with Dejen, lusting over Otienno, scheming to make Tash’s life more enjoyable or trying to repair her parents’ relationship. While she is irresponsible in a great many ways, she is kind-hearted and shows this in the way that she treats outcast Baba, who is looked down upon by the rest of the inhabitants of her home, coming to his rescue when he is injured or suffers bullying at the hands of some of those around him.
As we – and Adina – learn more about the conditions within the outside world, we gradually piece together what has happened to cause it to become so inhospitable and it makes for compulsive but grim reading. I do not want to give away too much here, but knowing that the chain of events leading to this state started at the start of September 2023 and that the science behind what the author has created is entirely credible, I cannot be the only reader wondering how much of what is written here will prove to be fiction and how much fact.
I have no idea how many books the series will comprise, or when Book 2 will be out, but this is a wonderful read for its target audience – one that will hook them in and, hopefully, spur them into action to help prevent any further damage to this wonderful planet of ours.
As always. my huge thanks go to publisher Neem Tree Press and to TheWriteReads for my gifted copy of the book and for inviting me to be part of the blog tour. Feast of Ashes is on sale now. Don’t forget to check out the other stops on the tour:
Mrs Sydney's Famous World's Smallest Library 