'Clean Air' by Sarah Blake: A Blog Tour Review // A Serial Killer, Deadly Pollen & a Family Stuck in the Middle!

Book Reviews

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of Clean Air. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to the author & Algonquin Books for this free copy.

Title: Clean Air
Author: Sarah Blake
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Pub. date: 8 February 2022
Series: standalone
Page count: 320
Source: the publisher
Genre: adult, science fiction

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“We couldn’t breathe the air. To some people it seemed quick, sudden even. To some it seemed gradual. In hindsight, everyone said the signs were there.”
A decade has passed since The Turning. The climate apocalypse has come and gone, and in the end it wasn’t the waters rising, as the scientists predicted, nor the temperature climbing, nor the forest fires spreading. It was pollen—spring allergies becoming worse and worse until the air became unbreathable, the world overgrown with trees.
In the past ten years, humanity has rebuilt, and Izabel has gotten used to the airtight domes that now contain her life. She raises her young daughter and attempts to make peace with her mother’s death. She tries hard to be satisfied with this new world, safe and prosperous as it is. Instead she feels stuck.
And then the peace of the new world is shattered. Someone starts slashing through the domes at night, exposing people to the deadly pollen—a serial killer. Almost simultaneously, Izabel’s daughter Cami begins sleep-talking, having whole conversations about the murders that she doesn’t seem to remember after she wakes. Izabel becomes fixated on the killer, both tracking him down and figuring out the type of man he might be. What could compel someone to kill, after ten years dedicated to sheer survival, with humanity finally flourishing again?
Suspenseful and startling, but also written with a wry, observant humor, Clean Air will appeal to readers of The Need, The Leftovers, and Fever Dream as it probes motherhood and grief, control and choice.

Content warnings: mass death, hospitalisation, murder, panic attacks, PTSD

This was my first time reading a Sarah Blake book, so I had no idea what to expect. What really drew me in was the unique dystopian world with its deadly pollen and safety precautions, which was something I haven’t read about in stories before!

Izabel and her family live in a new world where humans live in domes to protect themselves from the pandemic of deadly pollen that lives in the air now called The Turning. Humans take extreme precautions to prevent breathing in this pollen, which pretty much covers everything in this world. Izabel longs for the previous world, which she only remembers through childhood memories and old news stories on her tablet.

In the midst of this scary world, a serial killer emerges, slashing the life-saving domes that families live in now and killing whole families in their sleep. In a world where murder has not been even a problem for the past few years, people start panicking and Izabel becomes convinced that her family could be next.

Izabel was an interesting character to follow this story with. She is a survivor of our world who is nostalgic for the world she was forced to leave behind and still grieving the mother she lost in that world. She has an adorable daughter named Cami who made me fall in love with her from the first chapter.

I also love that Izabel was more or less normal. She is not really content with her life but wants to do her best for her daughter. Her marriage has lost its spark and she yearns for those early days. Izabel pretty much needs a change in her day-to-day routine and she gets it in the unwelcome shock of a serial killer in the neighbourhood.

I could strangely connect with Izabel over her fascination with something as macabre as a serial killer. Her motherly instinct to protect Cami also endeared her to me. As did her fear and nerves over her experiences.

What I really liked about Sarah Blake’s writing was that it was straight to the point. Rather than relying on descriptive writing to build her vision of a dystopian world, she used memories and action to help the reader envision it. The pace was fast and she would jump from scene to scene in a manner that conveyed the importance of figuring out who was behind the killings and putting an end to it.

The novel took some time to get to the serial killer portion of its plot but when it did, it was fantastic! I loved the scene transitions and the plot’s urgency. I liked Izabel’s POV is the only perspective that the story is being told from because she was such a relatable character.

The ending was interesting too. Clean Air did not end the way I envisioned it to. Rather than go out with a bang, the ending wrapped everything up with a neat bow. The journey to figuring out the killer was quite literally what mattered and pumped me up the most.

Like I said before, the world that Sarah Blake built here was exquisite. A future world that seems strangely relatable to what our own world is heading towards lent it a strange sense of realness. I loved that she thought about everything from transport to shopping to working and living environments in the face of deadly pollen floating around in the air.

Her new world made me think a lot too. What means would our own world devise to live with the current pandemic that is still affecting everything we do right now?

Clean Air by Sarah Blake is a unique dystopian thriller set in a strangely relatable world filled with deadly pollen that could kill anyone who breathes it in. I was utterly fascinated with the way this world lived alongside the trees that could easily kill them as well as the scary hunt for a serial killer who never leaves behind any clues. Exhilarating, probing and cautionary, Clean Air gave me a look into a world that could very easily be us in the future.