Like a miracle-worker, Noa lays hands on those with maladies and they leave the family’s house feeling wonderfully fixed. At a party one summer, he uses his touch to heal the grievous wound of a mate, and, shortly thereafter, quiet throngs of people begin knocking at the door of his family’s Hawai’i home, everyone seeking healing of some kind or another. The shapes of the sharks were thrashing, diving, rising, something like a dance.”įive years later, the novel shows us Noa beginning to learn the new powers evolving within him. As his mother Malia describes it, “The water where you were was all churn. His mother Malia goes into the water to save him, but it isn’t necessary-a shiver of sharks has come to the aid of young Noa, delivering him back to the boat somehow unharmed and now marked with the stuff of legends: the boy who was saved by sharks. Sharks in the Time of Saviors opens with Nainoa Flores falling overboard off the coast of Hawai’i. Kawai Strong Washburn’s debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors weaves this rattling existentialism through the lives of three siblings and the islands of Hawai’i, up and down the Pacific Coast, and over years of his characters’ individual and collective struggles as they each await the arrival of a miracle promised in their youth but never fully materializing-a shark circling the waters. There is no way to map its future, to quantify the forthcoming, to garner assurances. It does what it wants, leaving us to fight back as best we can and carry forward once the devastation ebbs.
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