CLEAN AIR
by Sarah Blake
~My Thoughts~
Izabel spends hours on her tablet, taking her back to a time before The Turning when the drinking water was clear, the air quality was tolerable—a time when going outside wasn’t fatal…
‘[S]he taps on [the news feed of] 2020. The summary popped up. A bad year. A global pandemic. Everyone is wearing masks then, too. She was eight years. Her mother was alive. They were happy.
The novel opens in 2042; Izabel is a housewife who lives with her husband, Kaito, once a surgeon, who now works from home as a robot technician, and their four-year-old daughter Cami.
‘The emergency warnings were and weren’t a surprise. When the trees had turned, two weeks before, to the south of them, it was clear people were going to die. A lot of people.’
Home—is now a plastic dome with air filtration systems for the few who survived the pollen apocalypse.
‘Izabel had thought no one would kill another person again. Not after what they’d be through.’
Oh, how wrong she was. A serial killer on the loose coupled with Cami’s sleep-talking about the murders makes for an interesting read in CLEAN AIR by Sarah Blake.
Thank you, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, for providing me with a paperback ARC of CLEAN AIR at the request of an honest review.
SARAH BLAKE is the author of CLEAN AIR, a cli-fi domestic thriller, NAAMAH, a novel reimagining the story of Noah’s ark, and poetry collections MR. WEST and LET’S NOT LIVE ON EARTH. She received a Literature Fellowship from the NEA. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the American Poetry Review, and the Kenyon Review. She lives outside of London, UK.
~D.K. Hundt Book Reviews~ 
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