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Kawai Strong Washburn's Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a Hawaiian family saga where ancient gods press up against a present of foreclosure, scholarship debt, and exile to the mainland. A boy plucked alive from a shiver of sharks becomes both the family's miracle and its slow undoing. Magical realism rooted in work, money, and place.
The Review
What hooks you first is the chorus. Washburn hands the story to the Flores family in rotating first-person voices, and each one arrives with its own grain and music. The mother speaks with a kind of devotional ache. Dean, the older brother, talks in the swagger and grievance of an athlete chasing a way out. Kaui, the sharp youngest, narrates with brittle wit and a wariness toward faith. And Noa, the one delivered from the water, carries the heaviest silence. The book lives in those shifts. You feel the way a single event refracts differently depending on who's holding the lens, and how a family can love each other fiercely while telling completely incompatible stories about what happened to them.
The premise sounds like fable, and the opening rescue is staged with genuine wonder, but Washburn is far more interested in the bill that comes due. This is a novel about what it costs to be the vessel of other people's hope. Noa develops abilities and ends up working as a paramedic in Portland, yet the gift never feels like a triumph. It feels like a weight he can't set down and can't fully control, while the family back home keeps reaching toward it like a lifeline they're not sure they've earned. The collapse of the sugarcane economy hums underneath everything. These are people squeezed out of the islands they belong to, and the gods, when they appear, feel bound up with that loss rather than offering any clean rescue from it.
The prose runs hot and physical. Washburn writes the body, the ocean, the mud and sweat of labor, with a wild energy that occasionally tips into excess but mostly earns its risks. When the writing reaches for the mythic, it does so from the dirt up, never floating off into pretty abstraction. The chapters that follow Dean's pursuit of athletic glory and Kaui's grind in a demanding mainland program carry a real ache: the loneliness of being the kid sent off to make good on everyone's sacrifice, watching the family debt follow you across an ocean.
The back half deepens into grief and reckoning, and the way the siblings circle back toward each other and toward Hawaii gives the book its emotional charge. This is a story about heritage as both inheritance and burden, about whether faith can survive its own disappointments, and about what a family owes the one it decided to worship. Washburn doesn't resolve those questions tidily, and that's where some readers will part ways with him. A meaningful minority find the final stretch unsatisfying, the answers withheld where they wanted landing.
If you love voice-driven literary fiction that braids the supernatural into something grounded and material, the comparisons to There There and to other multi-voice debuts hold up. It's an uneven book in places, but the ambition and the feeling carry it.
Reviewed by Avery
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