Matthew Sugiyama isn’t an ordinary painter. He is an Artist who can remake reality with his brush. This ability makes him highly sought after. But instead of accepting secure employment, Matthew leaves the abbey he grew up in to find the parents who abandoned him. His journey will take him across post-apocalyptic New England, where he makes new friends and enemies.

The first book in the saga of the Elemental Artist, Jami Fairleigh’s OIL AND DUST presents readers with a surprisingly pleasant, even pastoral apocalypse. Two centuries after the end of civilization, the remains of humanity live in rural settlements. People work the land, which is a hard life, but an honest one. There is no centralized government, organized religion, or money. However, our protagonist learns about a sinister conspiracy against himself and local communities. OIL AND DUST reads like a road trip story – except with horses instead of cars. As our protagonist encounters new places and people, he grows and changes. Matthew is a good person, but he is young and inexperienced. Every so often, this manifests as naïveté. At other times, he comes off as childish and self-absorbed. Fortunately, Matthew meets the likes of the taciturn engineer Ben Hensly or the level-headed scholar Josephine Pliny. They — and others — help him mature, becoming his new family.

Regrettably, OIL AND DUST suffers from significant pacing problems. The plot takes a long time to kick into a higher gear. Throughout the book there are too many scenes of Matthew visiting a place, interacting with interesting characters, and leaving forever. Then, in the final third, the novel comes to a jarring change both in tempo and tone. Suddenly, there are conspiracies and threats, while the story becomes quite grim. And yet, even then, there are numerous scenes of characters just hanging around, doing nothing. Fairleigh has written a story about likable characters in a beautiful, harsh world. But the novel fails to really dig into its setting or explore the tantalizing possibilities of the Artist’s unusual powers. This and its uneven pacing hamper OIL AND DUST from being as good as it could have been. Fairleigh is currently working on a sequel. Hopefully, that novel will explore her fascinating world  on a deeper level. The potential is certainly there.

While its setting is fascinating and characters likable, Jami Fairleigh’s post-apocalyptic novel OIL AND DUST suffers from some storytelling and pacing problems.

~Danijel Štriga, for IndieReader