In Carolina Ixta’s New Novel, Teens Fight Against Pollution for a ‘Few Blue Skies’

Fresh off the success of her Oakland-set debut novel, Shut Up, This is Serious, Bay Area author Carolina Ixta returns with a sophomore offering inspired in part by the inequities she saw in the region. For Ixta — a public education advocate and alumna of the Oakland Unified School District who now teaches fourth and fifth grade in San Leandro — fiction writing is a megaphone for social consciousness. Writing for a young adult audience, in particular, allows her to entertain young readers and teach them about their own realities.

Ixta initially wanted to write about Bay Area-specific issues, like the lead-contaminated water in Oakland public schools, or the accidents at Richmond’s Chevron refinery. But after spending quality time with her godmother in Southern California’s Inland Empire, Ixta learned firsthand about another pressing environmental issue: warehouses.

“I saw all of these large, gray buildings next to homes and parks and schools … and I realized it was a very similar issue to what was happening in the Bay Area, except that it was highly affecting their air quality,” she explains. The region is home to thousands of warehouses that generate daily transport truck traffic, creating heavy fuel emissions and congestion.

“I wanted to write about environmental injustice, particularly the way that it affects Brown and Black people — but specifically in this region, Latinx people,” she says. In Fontana, a warehouse was proposed right next to Jurupa Hills High School. And even though community activists opposed its construction, citing air pollution and student safety, the city council approved its construction in the spring of 2022.

In Few Blue Skies, Ixta invents the Southern California city of San Fermín, a stand-in for multiple places on the receiving end of environmental discrimination and racism. The book’s protagonist, Paloma Vistamontes, is a high schooler whose hometown is targeted for mass-scale warehouse construction by the fictional e-commerce conglomerate Selva.

Ixta draws heavily from real-life situations to ground her novel. Few Blue Skies opens with an epigraph from Elizabeth Sena, a founding member of the South Fontana Concerned Citizens Coalition, a group opposing warehouse construction: “The children in the Inland Empire are like the canaries singing in coal mines, but no one is listening.”

Sena is one of several people Ixta interviewed to lend the book its bite of truth. Other interviewees include San Bernardino filmmaker Sofia Figueroa, director of the Emmy-nominated KVCR docuseries The Warehouse Empire; local organizers; warehouse workers; and community members, including a couple whose children woke to nosebleeds due to poor air quality — a detail Ixta borrowed for her book.

She also included a Breathmobile, a mobile asthma clinic, that she learned about from an episode of PBS’s Earth Focus titled “Fighting for Air.” San Fermín’s air quality is so poor Paloma and her schoolmates have mandated Breathmobile checkups, which feel as routine as seeing a dentist.

Putting labor issues front and center

The core Few Blue Skies problem isn’t just that Selva exists and has designs on the town, but that nearly every resident works for Selva — including the fathers of Paloma and her friends. When the workers begin a lengthy strike against the conglomerate due to poor pay and working conditions, tension spills over from the picket line into every home in town, sowing marital discord and family dysfunction.

Ixta’s decision to set the novel during a strike period cleverly allows her to bypass the warehouse as a setting and focus on it as a symbol. The strike becomes a jumping-off point for Paloma and her friends to not only define their values, but also have them tested.

Ixta, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, has been mindful of labor justice since childhood. In addition to researching history like the United Farm Workers Movement, she was able to draw from her family’s past to inform Paloma’s story.

“My father was a delivery man for a bread company in San Francisco, so as a kid, I was very aware of how work was a way to make money, but [also] how work really affected my family and their health,” she says, noting that he sustained a number of injuries on the job. Ixta was also inspired by her grandfather’s time in the Bracero Program, a joint agreement between Mexico and the U.S. that offered millions of Mexican men short-term work in agriculture during a post-WWII labor shortage.

“[He] was technically a strike breaker,” she says, even though he “was just trying to send some money back to my mother and her siblings in Mexico.” Depending on one’s perspective, his actions could be seen as either noble or a betrayal. It’s the kind of nuanced conversation she likes to have with her students when she teaches them Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising, a children’s book about Mexican farm workers in California set during the Dust Bowl. In the book, a protagonist acts as a strike breaker during a unionization attempt.

They get into “vivacious debates,” she says. “We always come to the conclusion that no one is right and no one is wrong because everyone is just trying to survive in a world that is impossible to survive in.” It’s a piece of historical fiction she returns to each year, one that inspired her own work on Few Blue Skies.

“I really wanted to talk about how these historic issues are not over,” she says. “They have just shape-shifted.”

Memories of her father’s work life, testimonies from her interviews, and her research on generations of Latinx labor in America coalesce in the novel. The results are larger plots and small details that meaningfully build out the book’s world, but also connect it back to our own.

Paloma’s dad, who incurs respiratory issues from work, regularly drives to Mexico to buy cheaper inhalers. “My pa is so grateful that he can legally cross the border that he often dismisses the sadness of why he needs to cross it to begin with,” Paloma muses.

Ultimately, Few Blue Skies is a story not just about what people need to do to make a dollar in America, but also how much a dollar truly costs.

Resisting hyperoptimism

Ixta’s prudent decision to focus on the interpersonal fallout of the strike humanizes the fight and offers young readers an accessible framework for caring about labor issues. Paloma and her friends are teenagers who just want to go thrift-store shopping, experience the bruises of young love, prepare for college, work their first jobs at the local antojería, and celebrate holidays like Noche Buena with their families.

But they are having those quintessential American and Latinx experiences under Selva’s dark shadow, which literally blots out their once-blue skies. Ixta’s novel wraps these issues in a juicy love story and a sympathetic familial drama. Her prose is expressive throughout. A school fistfight turns one teen’s mouth into “a grid of red clenched between his teeth” and Paloma’s life is soundtracked to “coughs cacophonous, harmonizing, echoing” all around her.

Perhaps the most impactful choice Ixta makes is writing an ending to a young adult novel that resists the kind of hyperoptimism and neat resolution typical of the genre. This was done out of deference to the scale of Paloma’s fight, and the deep, lasting fissures it creates in communities.

“In the real world, that high school not only had that warehouse built, but they added three more,” Ixta says. “I didn’t want to disrespect that community and say that that’s not what happened because it really is. And I want people to pay attention to what’s happening there.”

Carolina Ixta’s ‘Few Blue Skies’ is out Feb. 3, 2026 from Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.