Erik D. Larson

Book blurb...

Kikiloa is Mitochondrial Eve, irrepressible mother of humanity and time-surfing teen trickster. 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. A literary speculative novel: Circe meets The Midnight Library by way of Ursula K. Le Guin.