While the two books tell a complete story between them, they also tell very different stories in isolation, enough so that it would seem viable to read this second half entirely on its own. That first book took Leilani Milton, a sixteen-year-old epileptic, from Hawai'i to O'ahu with her father for a medical trial, and the apocalypse happens while they're there, meaning that they struggle to stay alive and together and get back home to the big island. This second starts where that left off, with the form of the apocalypse understood, with Lei coping well with a vast responsibility and various factions fighting for their slice of the pie in this new and isolated world order.

For those who didn't read the first book, the apocalypse is aliens who function like turtles, not a traditional apocalypse but one that ties nicely to the Hawaiian setting of these books. Like a turtle spends its life at sea but migrates to Hawaii to spawn, so this space turtle, known in the islands as Emerald Orchid, lives way out in the depths of space but migrates to Earth to spawn. Its presence disrupts technology, so that our highly connected society practically breaks down overnight.

The flipside of that is that they consume radiation, meaning that the many nuclear meltdowns happening across the planet aren't poisoning us because the Orchid and her baby, are lapping it all up. And Lei, through her epilepsy, is able to talk with the Orchid, so asks her to stay here in orbit until such time as everything has melted down and been cleaned up. That's a heck of a call for a sixteen-year-old girl to make, effectively taking responsibility for all the chaos going down not just in Hawaii but all over the globe. She's speaking on behalf of eight billion people.

And that's where we come in with book two. Lei has made it home to Hilo, on the big island of Hawai'i, with her father and they've reunited with the rest of their family. Grandpa is a kahuna or spiritual counsellor and he's helping to guide the locals into a sustainable future through an interesting mixture of tradition and ecology. For now, especially after the nightmare that they encountered on the journey home from O'ahu, things seem entirely stable. The feeling is that they've survived the worst of it and now they're forging a better future together for when Lei releases the Orchid and technology can resume.

Of course, it isn't that simple. It might seem idyllic when Lei and her friends Tami and Keali'i go down to the beach to dive for slippahs, or lobsters, because they're plentiful now without huge fishing enterprises trawling the bay, but it isn't. When they come up with an impressive catch, a bevy of gunman open fire on them because the world is controlled by gangs now and they want what they can take. On Hawaii, there's an ongoing conflict between the Hanamen, who are led by Grandpa's old partner in the police force, now the Hana Sheriff, and the more local Mano. It doesn't work well for the regular folk who have to deal with both.

For instance, in trying to escape the Hanamen on the beach, Tami cuts her leg on some rebar in the bay, badly enough that they have to take her to hospital. The doctors, without any structure to officially sanction them, are doing everything they can, but they hardly have any supplies of antibiotics, because the gangs have already taken them all. Somehow Keali'i manages to visit the black market and acquire some to save Tami's leg, possibly her life. It's a stark reminder for us that, however peaceful it is up on the hills outside Hilo with family and friends and peace, it isn't the same for most people on the planet, even down those hills in Hilo itself.

The conflict between gangs is one abiding plot strand here, but it's far from the only one. Lei is seventeen now, having celebrated her birthday in chapter two, and her brief romantic interest in the first book, Aukina, a soldier at the army base on O'ahu, shows back up to rekindle that in the second. Tami and Keali'i have a kinda-sorta relationship, too, and I appreciated these minor romantic angles not because I'm looking for that in a book but because all these characters are young and have no idea how romance works. Austin Aslan, who did not write this as a seventeen-year-old girl, seems to grasp that well.

As characters come together through romance, others come together through conflict. We met the Hana Sheriff in the first book and learned that he and Lei's grandpa used to be partners on the force, but we were never given a reason why they fell out and moved apart. That shows up here and the Hana Sheriff is floated as absent tension throughout the first third of this book, gradually becoming present and a direct threat. There's also a voice that Lei hears during her conversations with the Orchid, a voice that's trying to communicate with the space turtle just like she does but with the opposite message: leave, it says. Leave now.

My favourite angle, for which I'm not sure I should feel guilty or not, is the one that doesn't tie to Hawaii. When Lei and her friends escape the armed Hanamen gangsters on the beach with a tasty supply of slippahs, they're rescued by a boat that's from Arizona. After appropriate levels of mistrust, given the circumstances, we get to know the couple who have sailed south from the mainland coast to Hawaii on their way to Australia and, while we get time in their company, we are given their story from back home in Arizona, which feels highly believable to someone who lives here. Apparently, here they called it the Rorschach Cloud.

The particular horror story for them is that the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station beyond Buckeye explodes and that's it for the valley. Because we've been hanging out with Lei, we can be relatively sure that it's not as bad as all that, but she understands that she isn't at liberty to tell them that, without explaining a heck of a lot more that won't sound remotely believable. While part of me feels that it wasn't appropriate to divert a thoroughly Hawaiian story for this aside from Arizona, part of me is also thankful that Aslan did so because it brings a perspective to Lei of the weight of her decision to deal with the Orchid on behalf of the entire planet. If she must do that, she ought to have at least one such perspective to remind her how serious it is.

As with the first book, there are some conveniences here. Everything also ties together with a powerful sense of neatness that simply wouldn't exist in reality, but hey, this is YA and it has a very particular job to do. Aslan does that and he does it well. To be brutally frank, while I found Aslan a fascinating conversationalist at CoKoCon, I enjoyed both halves of this duology a great deal more than I expected to. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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