Sharks in the Time of Saviors

This lovely novel knows what most people expect from a story about a young Hawai'ian boy who falls overboard into the ocean and is delivered carefully back to his mother by sharks. It is happy to allow those expectations, maybe even to subtly encourage them, even in its own characters, all the while undermining them until they finally crumble.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a story about a Hawai'ian/Filipino family, Malia and Augie Flores, and their children Dean, Nainoa, and Kaui. Malia and Augie struggle to make ends meet with their working class wages, but they have great hopes for their kids' abilities to go farther than they were able to. The kids are all brilliant in their chosen areas, and go off to the mainland to pursue their talents, but struggle to find their identities or purposes in life. Nainoa, in particular, carries the burden of his talent for healing and his family's expectations for him as the boy who was rescued by sharks.

The story is told through alternating voices of Malia, Dean, Nainoa, Kaui, and Augie. We get to know the different characters through their voices and their interactions with family members–friction between mother and daughter or brother and brother, tenderness between husband and wife, sibling rivalry, inability to break a silence. Mixed in with the family drama, there are themes of colonialism, reconnecting with land and indigenous spirituality, and being able to live as one truly is.

It took me about 2 days to read this, and I was absorbed almost right away. I did go through a process of feeling some friction between my expectations for the story and what was actually happening, but in the second half of the book I let go and just went where it took me without struggling. In retrospect, I think this process was likely deliberate on the part of the author (since the characters undergo a similar process), and I'm impressed with that.