Fiction characters walk right to an edge where fierce emotions encourage slowly jumping off while we readers keep turning a page. In the novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors (2020) one character is Kaui, an engineering student at a San Diego college. She’s been violently shamed by a woman she loves and her unravel is obvious. Struggling to recenter, she reaches back to Hawai’i energies, not where she grew up on Oahu but on Honoka’a land, Big Island.

She recognizes how nature’s land calls her feet for being on earthly ground to sense solidity again:

“I feel myself standing on a grass plateau, all green swells and curling wind and those ancient women of hula…My skin is dusted and salt-crusted and girded with gristly muscle. The ancients, hula: all those years since I’ve felt it this way. We are in the field, me and two lines of women, the pahu drum going like the fist of Pele in an earthquake. We dance and chant” (257).

With her eyes closed she discovers a dream-vision, finding her imaginary place in a wild open field and restores her life balance.

Cognitive neurons are a strange work gig and while closely reading a novel a brain believingly reacts to a fiction character’s physical activity and sensory experience as if. As if the book reader is in action and sensory experience herself. Empathy works to place ourselves in a character’s shoes, curiosity fueled on body, heart, and mind motives found while trekking in those shoes. We wonder what the character will decide next. We reflect how we might react if being the character. Trekking this way through empathy trails across the novel’s 373 pages, I keep a question with me: inspiringly, how does Kaui get through?

Kaui arrives into her Flores family as the youngest, a sister who has been rendered invisible all along. A key reason is because her brother Nainoa, the middle sibling, has intensive spiritual healing gifts. Or so the parents Augie and Mahlia are obsessively convinced. And the oldest sibling, her brother Dean, is a basketball superstar:

“So, yeah: Nainoa was becoming and Dean was becoming and I was invisible besides. But I was still becoming, too. I was. Okay, no one saw but that didn’t matter. There were all sorts of things inside me…and I felt like more and more I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted it bad enough” (38).

Kaui continues finding her life-support way when options look impossible growing up in economic duress. In a house where exhausted parents return from hourly wage-earning routines and hope for a miracle. In Nainoa the parents believe they have found one.

An early novel scene shows Kaui’s father Augie splurging for his family on a glass-bottom boat ride in clear tropical Kona ocean. Barely able to buy food for everyone, he wants to appear like the splurge is ordinary for the family. But Nainoa scrambles, as a kid will, overboard into the water. Where a band of sharks generously nudge him safely back to the boat saving him from his drowning, which had begun. Hawaiian culture filters gods and ‘aumakau (ancestors living before) appearing as nonhuman entity like sharks. Nainoa is now seen as being anointed a Hawaiian saint. We have the title then Sharks in the Time of Saviors.

Troubling Nainoa is his interior sense of the world that he alone will save Hawai’i through his healing powers. Understandable when he is low on energy given his savior work, yet he blames Kaui. “And okay, so he was tired. It was hard, because I felt sorry for him, but he was doing that thing where he wanted to feel like it was my fault—that he was feeling the way he was, and that I couldn’t fix it, and that he was special—all of it my fault” (35). Kaui reacts in a familiar way; she’s reinvesting in herself. Evolving as a stellar academic student at Kahena, a private high school on Oahu, and during her San Diego college semesters where she far excels in complex engineering classes, a rare woman in a sea of male bias. Believing in herself fiercely is how she grows into her future.

Where the storyline travels is how Kaui continues centering her Flores family. She’s returned from the mainland to productive land on Big Island where her engineering genius shows merit. Her brother Dean praises.

“Look at you,” he said. “Maybe Noa wasn’t the only superhero.”

“He never was a superhero, Dean,” I said. “That was the problem. No more saviors, okay? This is just life.” (364)

And her mother Mahlia radically shifts her perspective, how to see her daughter anew. She goes to visit the farm where Kaui works successfully to innovate. Viewing the progress, Mahlia admits:

“It’s almost as if a switch has been turned on: a warm excitement and guilt juicing through me at the same time. She didn’t get this capable overnight. These abilities—she’d been doing something extraordinary, all those days when we were watching Noa instead. Bit by bit she got bigger. Quiet and furious. We never really paid attention, did we? Now look at you, Kaui” (356).

Kaui also wonders how her farm ingenuity will advance. “Small farm. Broke family. Single and lesbian…” (342). Avoiding spoiler alerts, a plot twists until all the turns make organic sense. Read if you will.

Reading fiction alerts our reactions to strong emotions, the kind we often strive to avoid. Luckily, a reader wrestling a feeling on a novel’s page can be in uplift to register how. Even prepares for being open, more empathic, when meeting difficult others in daily life—away from trekking through a novel’s empathy trails. Since this book’s structure narrates from wildly shifting perspectives in each chapter—Mahlia, Dean, Nainoa, and Kaui—the cognitive neuron work is a fantastic challenge. One chapter, the last one, is from Augie’s point of view.

Empathy often softens us to see another’s denial in recognizable terms—rather than judging. The novel begins with Augie pretending that the sugar cane business where he has worked for years will remain open despite every historical change showing the opposite. He doesn’t prepare. The rest is debilitating economic history for himself and his family. When the novel closes he wonders aloud on a phone call with his daughter, Kaui at college, how his life might have gone if he chose a path where he learned a specific craft. The psychological weight of his decisions renders him mute and mumbling in the final pages. And still spiritually connected to Waipio valley where he wanders into supported through powerful energies—nature, ‘aumakau, and Hawaiian history.

Makes Hawai’i history sense that the land where Kaui thrives beyond her own inspirational expectations, and everyone else’s, has never been a sugar cane industry. She’s reinventing her Hawaiian culture forward. When she walks on farm land, she envisions spiritual presence:

“They are there. Finding me when I close my eyes. Women who can only be Kanaka Maoli, skin joyfully dark and thick with work, proud cheeks and eyes full of the old island ways. The salty, fruit-tinged stink of their sweat takes over my nose. They dance on a hilltop…they reap in bundles with hands plunging into dark-brown soil that gives and gives and gives. Something is alive all over my body now. Something like a hula that won’t stop dancing” (332).

If you have ever been empathically curious to place yourself in the shoes of a Hawaiian family like the Flores, reading Sharks in the Time of Saviors by author Kawai Strong Washburn gifts an immersive reading experience where time spent on Hawai’i land—whether via imagination or trekking the actual land—will be vividly enriched in complexity and hope.