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Review Quotes:
Writing about the lakes she knows well, Tracey opens up fresh perspectives. . . . She is a sincere and scrupulous guide, persuasive in her argument. . . . Tracey is alert to complexity in nature and emphasizes that saving the salt lakes does not mean restoring them to a pristine state.--Rosa Lyster "New York Review of Books"
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Caroline Tracey exquisitely weaves queer beauty into a narrative that is also largely about the death of the ecosystems around salt lakes. . . . The author's very personal connection to the lakes creates an intimacy that I find unexpected from how I usually think of science writing. . . And while
Salt Lakes doesn't turn away from the dread of climate change, it does, like the wildflowers in Death Valley, offer something queer, radical in our collective moment: hope.--August Owens Grimm "Hippocampus Magazine"
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From the Aral Sea to the Great Salt Lake, Tracey takes the reader on a personal and geographical tour of some of the most uncanny and unknown parts of our world.-- "New York Times"
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A call to protect marginal places and ways of life [that] resonates deeply.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
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An eclectic book asks how humans have shaped these 'queer' landscapes and how they can be restored.--Josie Glausiusz "Nature"
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Precise, lyrical, and at once deeply personal and epic,
Salt Lakes brims with brine shrimp and birds and charismatic bacteria--and an unexpected sense of life pushing through against the odds. I was gripped from the first page to the last.--Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
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Caroline Tracey shows us the beauty, vitality, and necessity of landscapes both strange and familiar. This is nature writing as it should be.--Michelle Nijhuis, author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction
Brief Description:
"Salt lakes are some of the world's most extraordinary ecosystems, but nearly all of them-from the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea and beyond-are drying up. Their decline is already the second-largest contributor to sea level rise, and their future loss will create widespread dust storms, threatening the water cycle, migratory birds, and human health. In Salt Lakes, Caroline Tracey takes readers on her travels across the American West, to Mexico, Argentina, and Kazakhstan, exquisitely describing the strange world of salt lakes, documenting their loss, and tracing efforts to save them. She delves into Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, and Australian Aboriginal paintings to make sense of how salt lakes have reflected the fast-changing natural world around us, while unraveling the lakes' lessons for her own life as she finds queer love and a sense of home in an imperfect world. Salt Lakes is a love letter to a strange and delicate ecosystem-and a moving call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives"-- Provided by publisher.
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Salt Lakes is a perceptive, poetic ode to one of our planet's most vital, and most overlooked, ecosystems. Caroline Tracey plumbs law, science, and literature in a debut as gorgeous and vibrant as the lakes she loves.--Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
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A stunning illumination of a peculiar landscape, from a writer fueled by devotion, curiosity, and rapture. Caroline Tracey deftly demonstrates the human impact on fragile ecosystems, and what these ecosystems can reveal to us about ourselves.
Salt Lakes made me feel a deeper kinship with the world.--Lauren Markham, author of A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging
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Salt Lakes is not just a book of nature writing, not just a memoir, but like the salt lakes themselves, something much more wondrous and precious. Caroline Tracey leads readers through her growing understanding of herself and the strange beauty of the ecosystems around her, and along the way reminds us of the abundance and possibilities inherent in queer lives and landscapes.--Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration
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Strange, overlooked, and unloved places find a voice in
Salt Lakes, a brave and openhearted book. Caroline Tracey shows the world's salt lakes as real places worthy of protection, but also as mirrors reflecting human history, identity, and desire.--Melissa L. Sevigny, author of Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
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A moving chronicle of the decline of salt lakes and [a] journey to finding queer love in a world ridden with ecological crises. . . .Vivid and tender, this is a powerful work of queer ecology.-- "Publishers Weekly"
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Caroline Tracey explores the mysteries and beauty of salt lakes. . . Queer ecology points [her] toward a life that defies reproductive binaries, to places in between what's deemed natural and what's not.--Robert Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
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A tender bildungsroman. . . . holds human emotion and ecological destruction at once. . . . Tracey [has] remarkable talent and erudition."--Kyle Paoletta "Baffler"
Publisher Marketing:
More than a hundred salt lakes dot Earth's surface, most of them hidden away in remote desert valleys. But today nearly all of them are at risk of drying up. Their death is a harbinger of rising sea levels, life-threatening dust storms, and environmental collapse.
Writer and geographer Caroline Tracey didn't know this when she began crossing paths with salt lakes during her early twenties. From the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea, across the American West and around the world, the unusual beauty of these shimmering, uncanny bodies of water captured her imagination. In Salt Lakes, Tracey travels across four continents to seek out and describe these extraordinary vanishing lakes and the people dedicated to saving them. She takes readers along on her adventures by train in Kazakhstan and on an inflatable raft in California, on her encounter with Mormon environmentalists in Utah and an Australian Aboriginal painter seeking to capture her country for her children. In evocative prose, she traces shorebirds' seasonal migration and the history of water law.
As Tracey chronicles the decline of the lakes, she also experiences dramatic changes in her own life and conception of self. Running parallel to Tracey's environmental journey is an intimate, human one: her story of finding queer love and building a home in a world fast being remade by ecological crises. By the end of Salt Lakes, she shows us how seeing the environment through a queer lens could help save our water system.
An exquisite blend of travel writing, memoir, and reportage, Salt Lakes is an inspiring call to fight for all that is fragile in our lives.
Review Citations:
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Publishers Weekly 04/13/2026 (EAN 9781324089025, Hardcover)
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Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2026 (EAN 9781324089025, Hardcover)
Contributor Bio:Tracey, Caroline
Caroline Tracey holds a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work in English and in Spanish has appeared in
The New Yorker,
New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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