Oil and Dust is the first book in the Elemental Artist series, by Jami Fairleigh, and placed 12th among the finalists of BBNYA 2022. Despite being labeled as a fantasy novel, I would call it better a post-apocalyptic story; set in an America where greed and corruption have brought the downfall on man, taking it to a world where technology is much less common; people have learnt to live in community, accepting each one a function to make it work. A world where artists are valued and treated as a fundamental part of society.

And that brings us to our main character: Matthew Sugiyama, an artist with a really valuable quality that makes him almost a star, as he's able to bring to life his paintings, altering reality with them. Any community would like to keep him as a part of them, but Matthew has his own mission: discover all that he can about his family, and hopefully reunite with it.
This premise is the main point of the plot, living the journey through the eyes of Matthew, as he will be our narrator in this adventure that will take him to several communities; all in the search of that family, and with a surrounding mystery, as somebody called T is sending letters to those communities trying to keep him in one place.

Matthew is an exceptional character, and we will be able to experience his growth alongside the journey, mostly due to the experience with other people and the contact with a reality that wasn't part of the abbey where he was trained. Each single of the characters that Fairleigh has created is unique, with its own flaws and virtues, a singular piece that makes the machine this novel is work.

The world shown in Oil and Dust is really original, using the post-apocalyptic setting to construct a utopian society, where each one has a place in the communities. Art is valued as a treasure due to its ability to shape reality. The downfall of modern society has been taken as a lesson of what greed and corruption bring to society, and how it shouldn't be repeated; as it is embodied in the nursery rhyme "Politics, Money, Power, Religion, and Greed. These are the things we never again need.”

I can't end the review without talking about the gorgeous prose that Fairleigh shows throughout the novel. In a book where an artist is the main character, it is fairly interesting to see how detailed and vivid are the descriptions, creating gorgeous images with words.

Oil and Dust is an excellent novel, a novel about growth in a journey through the eyes of a really special character. Certainly, a well-deserved finalist on BBNYA 2022, and I recommend everybody to read it!