Compared to some of the books by Arizona authors that I've been pulling off my signed shelves of late, this one is a relatively new arrival there. I believe I picked it up at CoKoCon 2022 at a signing session I shared with the author, along with its sequel, 'The Girl at the Center of the World', which I'll tackle next month, and a few more recent books that he wrote, some with Jacques Cousteau's grandson Philippe. I found Aslan fascinating, as a writer, an explorer and a politician; as he serves on the Flagstaff City Council. I'm happy to say that this book exceeded my high expectations.

I think its biggest success is in its balance, which I'd suggest would be ironic given the material but surely isn't. The more I think about it, the more I believe that it was completely deliberate, set up that way by Aslan entirely because of the material. There's a lot here, much of it about Hawaii, an island state (formerly a nation). It's about the people of Hawaii, its culture and its mythology, and there are many Hawaiian words here, with the 'okina preserved, that apostrophe that allows us to distinguish between Hawaii the state and Hawai'i the island. Those words aren't thrown at us too many at once and they're always clear. However, an awful lot really transcends its borders to work on a global scale, even an interplanetary one.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The lead character is Leilani, who's a hapa or half-breed. Her dad is haola, or a white man, but her mum is pure Hawaiian and grandpa, her mum's dad, is a kahuna, a spiritual counsellor. Mum and dad are professors of ecology at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Her name means "flower of heaven", which comes to have meaning later in the story, as does so much here. She's sixteen and she's a decent surfer, though she hates all the safety precautions she's having to take because she's also epileptic. She deals with that well but it flavours her life in ways she doesn't like.

Her epilepsy is also pivotal to the story in ways that I can only partly explain to avoid spoilers. The most obvious way is that it takes her off the island at a particularly crucial time, which means that much of the book is spent trying to get home. She had her first big seizure, a grand mal, at twelve and many since, but she's on meds now that have reduced their frequency to only a couple a year. Now she's on her way to O'ahu with her dad to take part in a clinical trial. It means coming off her meds for a short time but then taking a new medication, which may or may not be a placebo. The advice of her doctors is to not have any adventures for a couple of weeks.

However, circumstances soon change that with a vengeance. Just as we're let in on little details in odd moments that appear to be background flavour only to take on a deeper meaning later in the book, Lei and Mike are let in on little details of what's happening in the world around them. Early on, they notice that the president is skipping a conference. Then Air Force One is missing. But then it isn't and the president is supposedly recovering from appendicitis. Then the vice president goes missing too, as does the president of Japan, and clearly something important is happening that is simply not getting through. Ironically, when the president finally gives a speech that everyone has tuned in to hear, it's cut off midway, so we, along with the people of Hawaii, are still in the dark.

And, in the morning, they're really in the dark. There's no internet, no phone, no power. Somehow the apocalypse crept up on the world and took it largely unaware. Has there been a solar flare? A power surge of some description? Or has this to do with the green cloud that's floating across the solar system? Certainly that's what's shedding meteors that are causing minor tsunamis around the coast and a local paper quickly dubs it the Emerald Orchid. What matters is that society falls apart quickly. As Mike explains to Lei, it's not merely that O'ahu imports most of its food daily, it's that people will quickly realise that and that's the moment when it's going to get bad. And, as he predicts, it does.

This is a YA novel so we're spared the worst of it, but Aslan doesn't skimp on what he can get away with and he hints at things I wasn't expecting to see at this reading age. Obviously, getting off the island is becoming very difficult indeed. There's no GPS anymore, so few flights. Boats quickly get expensive and most aren't designed for inter-island travel, especially in the face of tsunamis. They also get expensive, one owner hinting at a trade of underage sex for passage, something which of course goes no further in YA. Nonetheless, there's looting and death and much human trauma as everyone starts to realise that their exits are closed.

If we imagine looking in on this safely from outside, we'd describe it as a humanitarian nightmare. However, while we're firmly stuck inside with Lei and Mike, the expectation is that this is a global problem and everyone else is going through exactly the same thing, except perhaps worse, given how many nuclear plants are in the process of meltdown around the world. Perhaps it's a positive that Hawaii counts as the islands at the end of the world. However, distance has changed. The Big Island of Hawai'i is only a forty minute flight from O'ahu but it's going to take Lei and Mike much longer than that to get back home, if they can even find a way.

And so they manoeuvre their way through the apocalypse, as we and they gradually learn what's actually causing it and what might be done to stop it. Primarily, it's a character drama, with Lei an engaging and fascinating lead and Mike her knowledgeable sidekick. It's a thriller, as they try this way and that to get home, only for neither to work so they're shuffled from one awful situation to another. Some are relatively stable, like a period on rations in an army camp waiting for a flight, where a romantic angle can be floated for Lei that, rather refreshingly, can't go very far. Others are more fraught, like a tense walk through the jungles of Moloka'i.

Of course, the thriller's form is post-apocalyptic disaster movie, which changes the flavour of the islands, only for Aslan to counter dystopia with utopia through people rediscovering the old ways. One minute everything's modern, all gunfire, stolen boats and radiation tablets. The next it's men in outrigger canoes spearfishing for food and delivering traditional chants. One suggestion is that the answer to our future is a return to our past. And, eventually, it all returns to mythology, with a fascinating ending that may well not work for everybody, given how grounded it's all been on the way to this point, but will absolutely work for others who will appreciate the patterns and layers.

I don't read a huge amount of YA because, unlike some of the classic children's genre novels I have been working my way through of late, it rarely manages to provide stories that work for its target audience but also function on a deeper level for adults. That does happen, though, and this novel is an excellent example of that. As a fifty-something grandparent, I may have caught a few things that sixteen-year-olds might not. Of course, I'm sure they would catch plenty too that I didn't. The point is that this flows quickly and easily but it carries a lot of depth and the more I think about it, the more I find. I am eager to dive into its sequel, which I'll happily review in April. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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