And then it ends, flipping its final page before clinging to the reader like cigarette smoke and humidity.

The novel’s beauty comes from Washburn’s heritage and voice paired with Hawaii’s supernovae idiosyncrasies. It is pulled and pushed, slipped into and out of, cast into blackness like a squid hook. There is no single font of beauty, of spirituality, of ipseity it comes from every direction, every place, every second breathe kiss stitch tear blade leaf bug fish dream wish word song creation tongue. And his parents, who created Nainoa in a truck bed beneath the moon and salted clouds, see in him a great promise to restore that which was violently rent away. His younger sister, supremely intelligent in engineering and hula, carves hers from the arcs and oscillations of the world. Nainoa’s older brother, sick with envy, carves an identity for himself from the asphalt, wood, chain and nylon of the basketball court, rising and striking like a cobra. Through him Hawaii runs through him the sick are healed through him each family member views themselves like shattered rainbows through his prism. Conceived under the march of ghosts, middle child Nainoa is bestowed with the breath of the gods after he falls off a boat and is rescued by a shark.

The novel follows the Flores family, whose members span the Big Island to the West Coast. It’s innervated not by magic but by essence-the spirit of a lost island buried not by the Pacific or a volcano but a civilization that’s never satisfied. Sharks in the Time of Saviors does not begin literally with this mythological birth, but it blooms from there, extends, suffuses. Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel reads like it was delivered by a shark from the sea, all blood, salt, cartilage and divinity.

Kawai washburn