Shark Dialogues

About this book

Compares with Toni Morrison.Glamour Beginning with the fateful meeting of a nineteenth-century Yankee sailor and the runaway daughter of a Tahitian chief and sweeping over a century and a half of passionate turbulent Hawaiian history Shark Dialogues takes its place as the first novel to do justice to the rich heritage and cruel conflicts of the beautiful and beleaguered islands and their people. Surreal provocative erotic magical meaningful and supremely wise it is a tale of islanders and invaders of victors and victims of queens and whores of lepers and healers. And at its center are Pono the magnificent pure-blooded matriarch and seer and her four mixed-blood granddaughters seeking to come to terms with the contradictions of their ancestries and the hungers of their hearts. Their loves their hates the bonds joining them and the furies possessing them are interwoven with ancient legends and lore of the islands whose past offers their salvation and whose future is their fate. Kiana Davenport has written a major contribution to the literature of the Pacific Rima great reading experience both brilliantly contemporary in its form and timeless in its illumination. A giant image-fevered luxuriant saga of a Hawaiian family powerful memorable intoxicating.Kirkus Reviews Complex resonant handles the sweep of history and the nuance of the personal equally well Sensuous.San Francisco Chronicle