WINNER OF THE 2020 PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT NOVEL. One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020. A finalist for the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the New York Times (#30), the Guardian, the Boston Globe, Oprah Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, BBC Culture, Good Housekeeping, LitHub, Spectrum Culture, Third Place Books, and Powell's Books. Sharks in the Time of Saviors is a groundbreaking debut novel that folds the legends of Hawaiian gods into an engrossing family saga; a story of exile and the pursuit of salvation from Kawai Strong Washburn. “Old myths clash with new realities, love is in a ride or die with grief, faith rubs hard against magic, and comic flips with tragic so much they meld into something new. All told with daredevil lyricism to burn. A ferocious debut.” —MARLON JAMES, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf “So good it hurts and hurts to where it heals. It is revelatory and unputdownable. Washburn is an extraordinarily brilliant new talent.” —TOMMY ORANGE, author of There There Named one of the most anticipated novels for 2020 by the Guardian and Paste Magazine. One of Book Riot’s Best Books to Give as Gifts in 2020. 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.

Everyone's take on this novel was middling. We pretty much all agreed that the setup of the book was good. Having Noa be a prophet and then seeing the rest of family deal with that was quite compelling. The book walked a fine line well of presenting a variety of perspectives in a family around this core, and the family relationships themselves were very well rendered. We believed every conversation between Noa and Dean (his brother) and Kaui (his sister). The depiction of the jealousy and rivalries in the family were vivid and detailed, and we made a lot of how a faith in a Hawai'ian destiny lead the whole family into a set of wild expectations. An interesting point we raised was whether there were any destiny at all -- the novel could as much be about how a family's expectations of a belief are destructive as it could be about the effects of an actual magically real moment on a family that responded with all the confusion and pettiness real people would. But the novel goes wrongly halfway through with Noa is killed on his return to the Big Island. While that move itself isn't bad -- it's quite unexpected and promises to be an interesting twist -- the book goes straight downhill at that point. The continued stories of the family veer directly into one-note and dubious tragedy. There are just so many bad choices in the storytelling. If Dean is so good at and so passionate about basketball, why do we only get like three lines on how he lost his position on the team? Why does Kaui choose to steal the car? What is going on with that irrigation solution? There was nothing interesting about the way Washburn makes the characters suffer - it was forced and obvious. At a certain point, it just felt like this was very much a first novel by a talented author -- scenes and conversations were good, but the big plot movements were forced and unbelievable, and the book just became a drag near the end. At the same time, we weren't sure what to make of the specifically Hawai'ian references. Washburn is clearly bringing a lot of detail about Hawai'ian life and experience, but none of it is framed for an outsider. There are a lot of lines we didn't know how to read or understand. I don't think there's anything wrong with Washburn speaking to an inside audience, but it left us unsure whether we were supposed to understand about Hawai'i as people not already familiar with it. These two issues came together in the very end when the ghost parade appears. Were we supposed to think the dad joining the ghost parade good? Was IS the ghost parade anyway? Was that the sign that the magic was real, and the Kaui is carrying it forward? The end just didn't answer any of the issues of the novel. We certainly think Washburn knows how to write and has the potential to make great work, but this novel missteps in the middle and never recovers.