A judicious mixture of fact and fiction make Kandy Collage eminently readable. Passing through the ten decades of the twentieth century is a kaleidoscope of people and places, men and women, rites and rituals, caste and social position, foibles and idiosyncracies of the characters who people these ten stories, both real and imagined. Each story centres on a woman.

Author Pethiyagoda has adopted an intriguing and certainly quite a novel method of making her characters come alive by giving a factual preface to each story. Thus each story is a window to the changes that took place during that particular decade. In the progression from one decade to the next, one sees a change as it moves to the next ten years. There are the women of the first decade, more Victorian than the Victorians themselves , conservative, usually hidden behind their mothers" ample skirts. The changes see the women of the later twentieth century making progress in every sphere of living, being responsible for their own lives.

Though the stories focus on women, the men come alive as well. The caste ridden head of the family has the last word in matters connected to his wife and certainly to his daughters. Marriages, on the whole, arranged by the elders with a kapuwa in attendance loom large in the stories, thus giving the reader a peep into the rituals and customs of Kandyan marriages, as much as to overpowering male domination.

As the decades and the stories progress, women’s docility and subservience fade and education and contact with other cultures move the women away from the traditional "virtues" inculcated in them by the parents and the extended family. The characters through which the author brings this change into focus are real, and one begins to wonder what proportion of their make up is real, how much is imagined!

Major events of each decade which impinge on the story are introduced at the beginning of each story. These events touch the lives of the characters marginally or at times more fully. The excerpts on Kandy and its surroundings from Robert Knox’s "Historical Relations of Ceylon" place the setting in perspective right at the beginning of the book.

I must hasten to add that though history plays its part in this narrative, Kandy Collage is not a historical treatise. The references to historical events are definitely marginal to the fictional content. The historical background has its place in each story which gives the reader a taste of the times and the characters that people each story. The characterization is outstanding, whether the author is depicting the life of a shy maiden in the grip of an unattainable love or a matriarch in the quest of a rich husband for her daughter.