Angela Blair’s Sun Kissed & Salted follows Alika Jones’s survival across four decades of trauma. After a bike accident in 1988 results in an out-of-body experience, Alika sets out on a reckless global odyssey. She elopes with Dario Moretti, a charismatic and vicious Italian musician. Her life spirals out of control as she travels the world with him, indulging in heroin addiction, busking in post-Berlin Wall Europe, fleeing a murderous rage in Mexico, stripping in Tokyo, and engaging in other risky adventures to places like Thailand and Africa. She becomes a target of a cult, has a stint in the army that is cut short by assault, and gets pregnant. What will it take for her to leave her abusive husband, take full agency over her life, and heal?

Angela Blair’s storytelling is superb, and the first-person narrative voice feels intimate and urgent, irresistibly pulling you into Alika’s perspective. The author grounds the chaos of Alika’s life in memory, with motifs such as the “zero” that miraculously multiplies a wire transfer, changing $800 to $8,000, the suitcase that follows Alika in every failed escape, and a cracked drum in Senegal. The pacing is breathless, and it follows the nomadic rhythm of life the heroine embraces as she leaps across continents and calamities with reckless momentum. The suspense and twists in this book arrive through shocks the characters experience. Sun Kissed & Salted takes you through the neon Roppongi nights to the squalid heroin squats of London to birthing homes, following the heroine's struggle to save herself and a spiritual awakening that comes to her through the Twelve Steps.

Sun Kissed and Salted by Angela Blair is a story of survival that follows Alika Jones from a 1988 near-death bicycle crash in Venice Beach, where she floats above her body and feels a divine presence. What follows is decades of transcontinental turmoil, starting with a hasty marriage to Italian musician Dario Moretti, a narcissist who abuses her in many ways. They go on an adventure, hitchhiking through Europe, busking through post-Wall Berlin, stripping in a Tokyo burlesque club, sinking into squats in London, and fleeing to Senegal. Alika’s life careens through alcohol and drug addiction, a coerced abortion, undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and homelessness. Even after joining the army, she leaves when she is assaulted. Can she ever find a home or truly heal?

Angela Blair delivers a story of a woman repeatedly shattered before eventually finding redemption through sobriety and a hard-won freedom that gives her a sense of home. The storytelling is accomplished in a direct voice and well-polished prose. Alika’s life is projected to readers through episodic moments that capture details like the night Dario chases her with a baseball bat, intending to murder her, or when he slaps her on their Big Sur honeymoon. The worldbuilding is extensive and detailed, and the author creates a fascinating backdrop that spans continents, offering commentaries on culture and places. Whether it is about the sensory details of Dakar’s markets, the filth of the Battersea squat, or the gas chambers of Fort Leonard Wood, the details are suffocating and reflect the consequences of Alika’s choices. Sun Kissed and Salted melds adventure with exceptional character work in this tale of restlessness, identity, and redemption in which a woman struggles to find a real home after being severely broken by the world she set out to explore.