SHARKS IN THE TIME OF SAVIORS, a glittering gem of a debut QUILTBAG novel

SHARKS IN THE TIME OF SAVIORS
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN
MCDxFSG Books
$27.00 hardcover, available now

PENAmerica Hemingway Award for Debut Novel Winner!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, on a rare family vacation, seven-year-old Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. When a shiver of sharks appears in the water, everyone fears for the worst. But instead, Noa is gingerly delivered to his mother in the jaws of a shark, marking his story as the stuff of legends.

Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods--a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family's legacy.

When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawai'i—with tragic consequences—they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ADVANCE REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I stared at the cover of this ARC for long, long minutes when I opened its garishly orange bubble-mailer. It is *lush* and deeply, for the shark-o-phobic like me, disturbing; its colors unsubtle reminders of the intensity of tropical existence, its acrobatic predator giving me the heebie-jeebies while reminding me that its life-force greatly exceeds mine, its lust for eating casts my puny efforts at survival into the shade; and its typographical choice, the handlettered look of the information about what I was holding, capped off my impression that this was vital and urgent storytelling.

My jam, in short.

Families suck. The one you were born into probably isn't the one you'd be happiest growing up in. This is an immutable law of existence and a giant gift to storytellers everywhere. But the fact is it's what you got, and you got to work with it for the rest of your life. That's hell and that's a gift. What it leaves most of us with is an aching, unfillable void of loneliness. But what your family would be, could be, is a nest of itchy twigs that poke you to go find and build and be something entirely other to its system:

Years already I'd been trying to understand what was inside me, while the rest of the world was trying it to tear it out.
–and–
There was this one philosophy class I been in at the university, where the professor was talking about force. He said people think force and power is the same thing, but really force is what you use when you don't got power.
–and–
Whenever I've made a choice in my life, a real choice... I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.

The voices of these characters whose family, that awful itchy nest, is wrapped in a golden mist of mythological reality, are shouting their horror and pain at the void inside them, the one that Being Different opens in all of us...and who could possibly be more different than a boy saved by a shark? Author Washburn will gladly fill you in on who: The whole damned crew, that's who, every single life suddenly changed without any notion of consent. Gods don't ask, they give-take. There's never a single uncomplicated act in a god's repertoire, that is not how the Universe works. Author Washburn knows this. He has plumbed some depths in order to bring this story to us.

If a god is a thing that has absolute power over us, then in this world there are many. There are gods that we choose and gods that we can't avoid; there are gods that we pray to and gods that prey on us; there are dreams that become gods and nightmares that do, as well.
–and–
I wanted us together, wanted them to feel with me the big nameless thing we'd worked our way into, a silence like the presence of our own private God.

He knows his god-onions, don't you agree? I get the distinct impression that he's been on the end of a god's pole before. He knows too much for it to be otherwise, imagination can not create this level of Knowing. (And anyone who wants to argue that imagination is all there is is firmly directed back to philosophy class. I got no patience to have that discussion on the forty-seventh anniversary of the first time I had it, thanks awfully.)

It's funny to say it, but this book's exuberant life-force is, at its heart, about silence.

I go itchy with want, thin on sleep. I feel her fingers in mine. The way we could be both hard and soft on each other. Her sandy voice calling out as I climb one exposed cliff after another. ... All night this all goes through me, the four hours of sleep I get.
–and–
The more I understood what we were all made of, the more everyone I'd touched stayed inside me, still crying out, showing me their injuries over and over and over and over and over.

The cacophony that is silence, the absence of color that is white, the depth of addiction and the height of passion: All facets of the same unfillable void. We do contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman famously said of himself. And still there is room for more: More life, more joy, more more more...and there can never be enough, because the essence of wanting is needing and without wanting there is no point whatever to any of this.

Take a match and hold it to the strip, start the strike. Somewhere at the microscopic level there are whole worlds of hot light that gather and jump to the match tip. That's what we were.

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