Amanda Huggins won the second prize in the WiK writing competition 2020 for her short piece, “Sparrow Steps” which appears in Structures of Kyoto: WiK Anthology 4 as well as in the website archives. A review of her short story collection, Each of Us a Petal, also appeared in the Reviews section of the website (June 2024). We are pleased to help members and prize winners of the Competition with reviews of their subsequent work. Following is a bio of the author.
Amanda Huggins is the author of the novellas The Blue of You, Crossing the Lines and All Our Squandered Beauty, as well as six collections of short stories and poetry. Her work has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Mslexia, Popshot, Tokyo Weekender, The Telegraph, Traveller, Wanderlust, the Guardian, and many others. Three of her flash fiction stories have also been broadcast on BBC radio.
She has won numerous awards, including three Saboteur Awards for fiction and poetry, the Kyoto City Mayoral Prize, the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award, the H E Bates Short Story Prize and the BGTW New Travel Writer of the Year. She has placed in the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, the Costa Short Story Award, the Fish Short Story Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and been shortlisted for the Bridport Flash Prize.
Amanda lives in Yorkshire, England and works as an editor. She is a frequent visitor to Japan and a member of Writers in Kyoto.
The present novel, The Blue of You, is a romance set in the northeast coast of England, a small fishing village which is the hometown of the protagonist, Janey. She has come home after some years living in London, and is haunted by the tragic events that happened here one Christmas time long ago. She wonders if she can lay those ghosts to rest and follow a new love, which would mean she would get involved with projects that try to preserve tradition, in the form of fishing methods and others, at the same as they discourage the coming of strangers who would end up destroying what was originally picturesque about the place. In this way the author touches on a theme which has popped up all over the world in recent years: Is it more important to preserve tradition, or to go with the flow of human progress, watching many things change from traditional to modern, with the danger that all tradition will be lost? Can tradition and newer ideas exist side by side? Is it important that they should?
Janey ponders these questions as she wonders whether it is better in her own life to go back to an old love or to go toward something new, ironically in a place she knows best, her hometown. The story jumps to different times, different years, which are indicated at the beginning of chapters, which it is essential to notice when reading in order to understand what is flashback and what is happening “now.” The tragic events of that faraway Christmas blend with the present as Janey finds out various pieces of the puzzle from people that were with her then, and learns which of those people were her real friends.
As usual Amanda Huggins provides plentiful word pictures, often riffing on the title of the book by describing different kinds of blue, for example: “The was something mesmerizing and hypnotic about the rough purr of the engine, the gentle slap of wave after wave, the way the water curled and parted as we chased the horizon…the vast, infinite blue, the way the light changes, they way it dances on the water.” Or this: “I bought a tasselled blue suede jacket… I stood up to try the jacket on, twirling around … I could see myself in every mirror, reflected over and over again in an infinity of blue.”
Speaking for myself, I have only recently discovered the pull of the color blue in all its manifestations, and realize that this particular color has a romantic rhyme, “blue-you” unlike any other color name in English. The title is of a fictitious song that comes up periodically in the story.
Like most of Amanda Huggins’ writing, this book has a romantic cast, not very Japanese perhaps, but with a butterfly-light touch that reminds one of Amanda’s years-long love affair with the country.