Snowflake, AZ by the brilliant (and sadly no longer with us) Marcus Sedgwick. A sensitively written and powerful novel about environmental illness - a superb book for raising awareness of invisible illnesses. Read my review here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vDkpSAJXcOs7joz7YqhiZC2RCwfkF861/view?usp=share... ( )

I want to do this book justice. The reviews I have read elsewhere are very mixed. I have to say I was intrigued
by the ideas about health and illness, and the role environment plays in those.

Our main character is Ash, who comes to Snowflake, AZ (a real place) in search of his stepbrother, Bly, who was supposed to be training at a policy academy but has unaccountably disappeared from there and is living in Snowflake. What Ash finds when he gets off the Greyhound bus is an isolated community of people suffering from environmental illnesses (EI). Bly has become ill, and joined this community. Shortly after arriving, Ash himself becomes ill, and learns what it is to live with a mysterious illness that the outside world thinks is all in his head. He spends months, which turn into years, unable to walk more than 1/2 mile or stand on his feet for more than an hour, because it just makes him weary and sick. The other residents take him in and help him care for himself. They are quite an interesting group including a philosophy professor and an immunologist.

An important thing to know is that the author himself suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, and learned about this community before he wrote the book.

The book is written in the form of a memoir, with Ash looking back on his life from a future where something terrible has happened to the entire planet, but that something is never spelled out. He tells us that the world was living on top of a volcano, but maybe that was metaphorical. Maybe Sedgwick is suggesting that the people of Snowflake were the "canaries in the coal mine" who were experiencing what was to come for the rest of civilization.

I find the way Ash speaks to suggest he is from some backwoods, unschooled society, but that is not the case. I don't understand why Sedgwick gave him this sort of voice, or why at least one of the characters, Mona, a former college professor, seems to speak in this way also.

It's interesting to me that Sedgwick's books have been marketed as YA. In this case, there is a narrator, Ash, who is a teen when the story begins, but the story is really geared to an older teen and definitely for adults.

Also, the book cover is really unappealing and off-putting. As a former HS librarian, I know that covers like these, with a picture of a plain house in the desert, do not fly off the shelves. Do book designers actually read the books they design covers for? There were so many elements that could have been used to sell the book--pictures of people wearing hospital masks, standing in the desert, would have been far more effective.

All in all, I liked and was intrigued by the ideas in the book, and Sedgwick is really good at creating atmosphere. But it's not a five for me. ( )