What readers are saying about Dead Fish Wind
—Jessica Giles, Flamingo
“The scariest part of Cooper Levey-Baker’s near-term dystopia in Dead Fish Wind is that after our poisoned, red tide summer, that future is already here. Levey-Baker’s heroine, Cicely, scrapes by in an ecologically ruined Florida. One wishes this taut novel, Levey-Baker’s first, could serve as yet another eco-warning. Instead, it’s a guide on the dark choices we will all soon have to make to survive.”
—Tony D’Souza, author of Whiteman, winner of the Florida Book Award for Fiction
“For those who adore the dystopic cli-fi, the not-quite-today, the Jeff-VanderMeer-on-a-plate-in-Florida, Cooper Levey-Baker’s Dead Fish Wind does it all. Ciceley, our heroine, in her pasties serving Cub Scouts. Cicely confronting her father with a boxcutter. Ciceley inching toward happiness with Zinnia, a remote chanteuse. Dead Fish Wind, Levey-Baker’s first novel, is set to explode. But beware the orange-scented golf course, the male nurse in blue scrubs, and, of course, the fish.”
—Terese Svoboda, author of Great American Desert
“Laugh-out-loud funny moments.”
—Megan McDonald, Sarasota Magazine
“Set in a dystopian Florida where life is ugly and sweaty and full of foul smells, hence the title, Cooper Levey-Baker manages to find enough moments of beauty and human connection to make his first novel a memorable experience. Our heroine Cecily is working at an awful job and taking care of her awful father. Her journey to solve the great mystery of her life—why her mother abandoned her as a child—is deeply emotional and beautifully rendered. Levey-Baker sees things in the detritus of ruined lives that others miss. The result is a novel that’s as bracing as a cool breeze from the gulf.”
—Robert Plunket, author of My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie
—Tiffany Razzano, Patch
“By turns powerful, poignant, funny, trenchant, and bold, Dead Fish Wind is great American fiction in the naturalist tradition of John Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser; it forces us to see what many of us might chose to ignore, and by doing so, it pricks our consciences into a reckoning with the reality of what it is to live in Florida and the United States in 2022.”
—Alexander Lobrano, author of My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris
“The Florida depicted here is one we know and one we don’t want to know; it is our present and it is our possible future. Levey-Baker’s achievement, through wondrous prose and compelling characters, is to vividly bring us into this debauched and debased world and, perhaps, offer us a plaintive warning. Dead Fish Wind is an important novel from an impressive new writer. It’s not to be missed.”
—Brian Petkash, author of Mistakes by the Lake