My sci-fi novel, “Who Saw the Deep,” made it into the semifinals of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Publishers Weekly reviewed the full manuscript and offered this review:

This novel is well written, original, and clever. Noah Heath has just completed his doctorate in computer science and his father suggests he give himself a break and help a local senior citizen with some handyman chores. Amelia is a woman that Jaime Heath has known since childhood. On Noah’s first day of work, he notices a flash in the sky, a silver needle, but Amelia denies seeing it. Even so, he hears her call her daughter, Leah, saying,”it’s happening again.” When he returns home, his father starts telling him about the family “artifacts,” a few chunks of old metal. Noah starts to question, and more importantly, believe his father and Amelia’s tales of centuries old invasion and the part their forebears played in it. That the power of computers is limited only by our imaginations makes the tale convincing; the lack of little green men and the highly plausible abilities of the villains make it wonderful reading. It’s a pity to classify this book as science fiction; it reads more like the ancient myths, or even fairy tales. The author really knows his characters and uses them beautifully. Perhaps he’s had centuries to develop them.

If you’d like to read an excerpt, go to my novel’s page on Amazon and download it for free by clicking the Buy Now button. If you’d like to leave a review, that’d be awesome.

By the way, all manuscripts are read without the author’s name, so the reference to the author as a “he” is not surprising. Additionally, the competition started with 10,000 manuscripts and have whittled the entries down to 100 for this round. Technically, I’m only competing against the other General Fiction entries, which means they started with 5000 and it’s now down to 50.

What’s next? May 22: Six finalists announced (picked by Penguin). Amazon customers vote to pick the winners.

I seriously doubt I’ll make it into the finals, but I’m delighted that someone at Penguin will be reading my manuscript.

Disclaimer: Publishers Weekly is an independent organization and the review was written based on a manuscript version of the book and not a published version.