Sarah Blake's mind strikes again!

Set in a post-apocalyptic world where just breathing outside has quelled the human race, Izabel and her family are working to re-build their lives and create a community that can survive. Living in a very manicured world of self driving cars, air locks, and bubble homes, Izabel's life with her husband and young daughter is idyllic but memories from the Turning leave an underlying anxiety surrounding their everyday life.

When an unknown person starts slashing through unsuspecting families houses, the town is thrown into a serial killer manhunt that this post-Turning life has yet to encounter. As Izabel's fascination with the situation increases, a unsuspected force is helping her track the killers movements and may be the help the police need to close the case.

With all to close to home parallels of this world and our world today, Blake shows the reader a very possible downfall to humankind's treatment of the earth. This sci-fi, thriller keeps the reader hungrily turning pages to see what is going to happen next. Novels have predicted the future before. Will this be the next?

"If you take some agency in that relationship with death, that you will chart and course over your life - if you do that - you won't be the first."

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Clean Air is definitely an unusual read. The speculative fiction aspect is really cool, it imagines a world where humans have been killed off by trees of all things! Pollen has become overwhelming and deadly, forcing the remaining human into domed living with masks and special precautions. We follow one family through their day to day until serial killer begins popping domes and killing families around them. Izabel, the mother of this family, becomes obsessed with the killer and finds her paranoia rising as he draws closer and closer to her family.
I'm not sure I "got" this one. I liked the environmental aspect but there was some supernatural stuff in there that was just out of place in my mind. That said, I loved the world building and the depth of the characters. The ending was a bit abrupt for my taste but it did give us the answer we needed.

Thanks to Algonquin Books for the gifted advanced copy. All opinions above are my own.

I really wanted to like this one. With themes of motherhood, identity, and morality all set in a climate-ravaged future, this one seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, this one fell pretty flat for me. I did not vibe with the author's writing style, especially the clunky dialogue. The plot seemed very thin and undeveloped- and required a lot of suspended disbelief. The characters were very two dimensional and the relationships did not feel realistic. Some parts read a bit over the top which made me wonder if the book was intended as a sort of satire- but if so, I didn't get it. All said, there were a few standout quotes and the plot itself was unique. I would recommend this one to anyone who enjoyed Blake's previous novel Naamah and for fans of speculative, dystopian fiction.

A little too on the nose almost for me. This book takes place in the future when the plants have begun producing so much pollen and we are all forced to wear masks outside. It is a wonderful wild ride through a utopia but where we have to live in plastic homes in order to avoid the pollen. It was very well-written and due to the fact that people have to venture out in either full body biohazard wear or full face masks, the identity of the killer in this book was surprising and remained unknown to me until the end. However, the story was not just a thriller, but touching as well. Seeing how this sort of thing is not as impossible as one would think was definitely at the back of my mind the entire time.

I liked this book overall! It wasn't at all what I expected but it worked really well. It's a bit surreal throughout but that's not a bad thing.

Summary- Izabel lives with her husband and daughter in a world where the tree pollen turned toxic, killing most of the people on Earth. Everyone lives in plastic domes to protect them from the atmosphere, but someone starts slicing open the domes, killing the families inside.

This book is about choosing to find a utopia in a terrible situation, and having to find what makes you happy, and having to choose what's best for your family. It manages to get deeply political messages across in the course of the who done it mystery and I really liked that. The premise of the novel made me think it would be a gritty dystopia thriller/mystery and it's certainly not that, but I think I like it more because it's such a different take on living past an apocalyptic event.

And it's got magical realism!

The characters were good! Paz's motivation was clear but her actions were so erratic that I was super confused alot of the time, but the other characters were consistent.

Author uses an app that allows the main character to revisit news articles from the past too get the reader up to speed with how the society got to that point, as well as help contextualize and compare the book's disasters with ones that are more modern to our time. It's pretty effective at getting the point across, if clunky at times. I wish it had a name and not just called "the app" but I can also see not wanting to pick a name that doesn't age well.

Overall- yeah, pick this one up. I've been thinking about it alot- I ended up taking notes and highlighting in my Kindle as I read because I just liked so many details and wanted to keep track of them too munch on later.

The future didn’t happen the way humanity had expected. Instead, the earth’s trees went into attack mode, releasing massive amounts of pollen that eventually claimed the lives of the old and the young. Survivors live in plastic bubbles and wear masks for the few minutes they might be outdoors. Clean air can only be found in sealed, controlled, environments. Ten years after half the world’s population died, society was having a renaissance.

Izabel and her husband Kaito are lucky to have a child, four-year-old Cami. Kaito works remotely with the robots that harvest food. Izabel is a traditional stay-at-home mother; she doesn’t claim basic income because her husband’s job gives them enough to live on.

After the horror of the Turning and the deaths of millions, Izabel never expected humanity would resort to violence again. Everyone has all that they need. Then, a senseless act of murder occurs in their town. An unknown assailant has slashed the plastic bubble of a home, killing the family within. At the same time, Cami begins talk in her sleep, holding conversations that indicate foreknowledge of the murder’s plans.

When Izabel tries to intercept the next murder, she manages to save the life of one child but now is known to the murderer, and this leads to consequences she could never have imagined. Izabel is determined to protect her child and to stop the murders. She is a protective and proactive mother who understands that “sometimes love is a decision,” and acts on it.

The future society in Clean Air is original. Izabel watches old news and television shows for entertainment. Trees are the enemy. There are shopping malls and temples where you can have your cards.

What rose up in place of religion was a revitalization of the spiritual and the unexplained. People wanted to believe there was an energy in the universe that connected everyone and everything, an energy that could articulate those connections, provide feedback, clarity, if one knew how to hold the conversation.

from Clean Air by Sarah Blake
Japanese folk tales inform the story, including the tree spirit called kodoma which figures heavily in the story.

Central to the story is the memorable Cami, a precisely drawn child, at once a normal four-year-old and a sagacious old soul.

The writing is clean, direct, without emotional or stylistic embellishment. You know the character’s inner lives through their actions.

Clean Air is a unique novel, one that crosses genres and interests, and I believe even age groups.

I received a free egalley from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

I enjoyed this book. The idea of the trees turning on us because we are destroying the earth is crazy to think about since we're right in the midst of destroying the world for real. It's kind of scary. Although this particular situation is unlikely, it does show almost a post apocalyptic type world. Some of the conversations between characters in the book are weirdly written ans don't seem realistic for how people actually talk. Other than that I enjoyed the book. I feel like it did wrap up too nice ane neat though with the killer.