Few Blue Skies (YA fiction)

     Carolina Ixta's Few Blue Skies is targeted to the YA crowd. I, however, would recommend it for its target demographic and way beyond. It combines a truly engaging, at times heartbreaking, narrative with highly believable characters with an expose of an evil more privileged people can remain blissfully ignorant of: environmental racism. This fine book has the potential to do a whole lot of eye opening and hopefully to enrage.

     There used to be a whole lot of farming going on in San Fermin. Now the few remaining green spaces are endangered. Silva, a huge conglomerate, is putting up warehouses frequently in very targeted locations: the side of the town where primarily people of color live. The air pollution has become so bad the high school is frequently canceled, replacing in class instruction with packets students pick up and complete at home. The mayor, who lives in the unaffected side of town, the white side, is basically a shill for Silva, rubber stamping all warehouse proposals despite growing opposition, even potentially green lighting one that would be right next to the high school.

     Narrator, Paloma, is seeing her family break up. Her father, a Silva worker, is a leader of an ongoing strike. He's determined to get decent working conditions for himself and his fellow workers. Her mother, feeling that nothing is going to change for the better, just wants to get the Hell out and move back to the town she grew up in. San Fermin is Paloma's home town. She desperately wants her mom to not give up and leave. She's worried about her father though. His asthma has become a lot worse.

     Julio has lost his father to Silva. His beloved dad, a Silva worker, died of lung cancer. His grief stricken mother became unable to work, leaving it to his sister to support the family. 

     Paloma and Julio become partners in a research competition. The choose as their subject the harm Silva is doing to the health of the people on the wrong side of town. They are desperate to win. It's the only way Julio can afford to go to college and gain the knowledge and skill set to change things. They both want to expose the great harm Silva is doing. 

     But when they do win accepting the prize would involve a terrible moral compromise. 

     In college Ixta took a class called Urban Education. She learned that in Oakland where she grew up the school water fountains werae contaminated with lead. She processed this information differently than her classmates did. "For many of them, it was a reality only to be theorized, a solemnity to be imagined. For me, it was a spiral of panic--a realization that I had been exposed to poison, that my family had been exposed to poison, that children today were being exposed to poison."

     Ixta wondered what the impact of environmental racism would be on the future of the child victims. "If students are constantly surrounded by factories, distribution facilities, and warehouses, how would this inevitably affect their psyches? How are they not to believe that this is an inescapable facet of their futures? And how could people in power be okay with this?"

     Maybe because they benefit from it all the way up to the White House?

    Few Blue Skies would be a most excellent acquisition for public, school, and home libraries and a great selection for book clubs. 

On a purrrsonal note, Friday night on her birthday Amber participated in a most excellent panel discussion event. Seven horror book authors responded candidly and enthusiastically to questions posed by the moderator and audience. Very worth attending!!!

A great big shout out goes out to the panel of talented writers and most especially to the one I personally gave birth to.

Jules Hathaway 

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