This year, I entered my draft novel, Rupetta, in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. This is a novel I’ve been working on for a while. In fact, she grew from a short story I wrote while I was at Clarion South in 2005 (The short story was called ‘A Feather on the Breath of God’, you can read it online at eatbooks, here).

10,000 entries were received across two categories: adult and young adult fiction. Recently, the quarter finalists were announced: 250 adult novels, of which Rupetta is one! The judges prepared reports on all of the quarter finalists (their decision was based on reading the extracts, so the reviews are of the extracts only). Here’s what one of the judges said about Rupetta:

Rupetta is a thoughtful tale of an intelligent mechanical person in the 1600’s. It is told from the perspective of the mechanism. Rupetta is somewhat of a philosopher, as she looks back over the humans and events in her lifetime. The writing is absolutely exquisite. It’s romantic and evocative and mysterious, and imparts a wonderful atmosphere. I would love to hear this excerpt read aloud by a skilled narrator. I don’t have a good feel for where the plot might lead us. This may be a quiet, thoughtful tale, or one full of adventure. It’s too soon to tell. But the writing style and the unique character make me wish I could read farther, even though I can’t guess where the story will go.

You can download a kindle version of the extract I entered from Amazon here (You don’t have to own a kindle: you can download the Kindle App for reading the extract on your PC for free from the site).

Or read it on my website here.

If you like what you read, you can post a review on the Amazon site! That would be super wonderful 🙂