[book post] Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn

[queenlua]

"Whenever I've made a choice in my life, a real choice..." She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder just for a second. "I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach [...] I'm always losing better versions of myself," she says. "I don't know. You just have to keep trying."

A rock-solid debut, and probably my favorite novel I've read since February. I can't wait to see more from this author.

The schtick: Nainoa Flores falls off a boat into shark-infested waters at age seven, and instead of getting chewed to bits, the sharks very gently pluck him up and bring him back to his family, unharmed.

In a conventional fantasy narrative, this would be the start of some Chosen One TM journey where he slowly learns the power of talking-to-sharks under the guidance of some wise mystical mentor or whatever. Except, this is set in modern-day fucked-up-by-colonialism Hawaii, so the biggest boon is the media sensation around the story, because Nainoa's parents have been in dire financial straits ever since the already-precarious sugarcane industry collapsed, and their multiple-jobs as bus drivers and convenience store cashiers and such sure don't amount to much, but the surge of donations from people fascinated by this shark story does.

Nainoa does end up having magic powers, of a sort, but they're much more precarious and subtle than you'd get in a straight fantasy story (think more magical realism, though I still don't think that's quite the right descriptor). Speaking of Nainoa: I was promised by helicoprion that he was a bit of a mopey up-his-own-ass fuckboi, and he definitely delivers compellingly on that front. Said fuckboi'ery + aforementioned dire financial straits are the perfect recipe for disaster—Nainoa's two siblings (asshole jock basketball guy Dean and smart-as-shit youngest-child-syndrome Kaui) end up resenting the shit of Nainoa, and the whole family develops Catastrophically Awful Coping Mechanisms, which means that even though all the siblings end up in wildly different corners of the west coast, they still can't shake all the baggage they've been building up and very determinedly ignoring. It took a while for this to be clear, but: fundamentally this is not a story about a Chosen One, really. It's about a family splintering apart and what happens afterwards.

So, in other words, my shit.

The prose is a touch overwritten—not overwhelmingly so, just a whiff that's somewhere between "this man just finished a snooty MFA" and "this man wrote a lot of snooty fanfiction." (Maybe it's the scene structure, now that I think of it? The author does a thing with his scene structure that I've seen done in fanfiction I really like, but haven't seen done as much in published work, and it was honestly delightful to see someone pull it off in this context, if only because it means my gut-instinct approach to scene building isn't fundamentally unpublishable :P) The plot is a little thin, and yet there was something endlessly compelling that kept me turning pages—it's the voices of each of the characters that kept me going, I think, moreso than strength of story; I wanted to know each of them so much better, and never found myself trying to skip ahead to the next character's chapter, which is kind of impressive; normally that's the first thing I do in multiple-points-of-view stories.

The plot also makes a pretty bold decision halfway through, that I'm not sure entirely worked? But I'm not sure it failed, either; I'm still chewing it over. Certainly it took the story in a much different direction than I was expecting, a direction that I enjoyed by the end, even though I was so jarred by the whole thing. Like, without spoiling anything: the novel's penultimate bit pulls off a "guess we've got to talk because we've completely run out of ways to avoid each other" conversation that is so deeply earned and honest that it kind of floored me; the kind of thing that couldn't have happened in the story that I'd initially imagined, but worked so well here.

Which is why I'm so excited to see more by this author: I already like what's on the page, and I like the balance between "more experimental stuff" versus "stuff they've got down pat"; and thus, I want to see how they surprise me next time.

Finally, because I couldn't find anywhere else to put this: while obviously I love Kaui because how could you not, I gotta say (1) Dean's probably the most compelling and plausible jock-character-voice I've read in a long time, and (2) I was extremely amused by the author's deliberate obfuscation in never directly naming the university Dean attends, as though there is more than one university in Spokane, Washington with enough basketball prowess to make it to the Final Four of the NCAA tournament. Go bulldogs.