Kiki was born an outcast 200,000 years ago, then enslaved. And now she’s a freckled fourteen-year-old bounding across a San Francisco park to meet her kind, grounded friend Hazel, who Kiki believes can cause even death to pass people by. Probably.
Flickering across a trillion universes, Kiki is determined to discover an antidote to entropy before all meaning is lost.
When a cliff collapses beneath them and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left alone with their attacker to begin her own coming-of-age, while Kiki’s hopes unravel back to the trauma of her bleak beginnings in a dying prehistoric world.
But Kiki never lets up, whether lamenting a Hawaiian tsunami, alchemizing sniper attacks, weaving through highway pileups, going Jungian, or baking perfectly average cookies. And throughout, she spars with her infuriating, enigmatic mentor Paha, who believes surfing is elegy: all waves break, and fighting the end only creates suffering.
The Kikiloa Chronicles is Erik D. Larson’s wild, tender, and philosophically ambitious debut, carried by Kiki’s unmistakable voice from the devastating loneliness of her first life to the hard wisdom of friendship. Hopeful and imperfect, she wrestles with love—a force like gravity, alive at the core of a universe destined for darkness.
A literary speculative novel of time travel and an irrepressible Mitochondrial Eve.
Think: Circe meets The Midnight Library by way of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Content Note: This story contains scenes of natural disasters with loss of life, gun violence with young teens in danger, and sexual oppression in a dystopian prehistoric setting. The scenes are not graphic, but readers sensitive to these themes may wish to know in advance.
While the story involves teenage characters and strong adventure plotting, it is a character-driven adult literary novel and only suitable for sophisticated YA readers.
