Snows of Mauna Kea

Hawai‘i has been waiting not-so-patiently for Kiana Davenport’s fourth novel in the series she began in the 1994, the crowning work of what she began with Shark Dialogues.

Well, it’s finally, almost, here.

And we are honored that Davenport has chosen to preview Snows of Mauna Kea in The Hawai‘i Review of Books. Davenport’s report from New York City in the direst months of the pandemic, when she was trapped alone in her apartment, was the keystone of THROB’s first iteration in April of 2021. She definitely helped launch us. Now she’s doing it again, giving us, and Hawai‘i, the first chapter of an epic that promises to bring it all back home one more time.

It’s not really been so long since Davenport changed the literary landscape of Hawai‘i with Shark Dialogues, introducing readers both inside and outside the Islands to an unfamiliar, multi-braided, international-inflected, female- and kanaka-centered storyline emanating from under the volcano’s peak that dominates the Big Island. This was no Hawai‘i they’d ever seen represented in book or film or TV series.

It was a hit for all the right reasons. Best of all, for writers from and of Hawai‘i, Shark Dialogues and its sequels, Song of Exile (1999) and the bestseller House of Many Gods (2006), felt liberating. They said: Go ahead. From here you can write about anything, your way, obeying no one’s guardrails, relying on your own experience and vision.

Big and geographically unfettered, able to imagine characters spun out by diaspora and family fates, Davenport’s novels gave writers room. They showed modern local life here and abroad. Trapped in timeless Hilo, a reader could see herself in Paris, Shanghai, New York. I can go there, too. In words as in life.

The novels throbbed with passion, which, unfashionable as it may feel in some literary circles, sure seems to be what people want (or look back on tasting, or worse, just missing); bursting with linguistic fireworks, too. Going off on soaring arias, lyric descriptions of nature and animal life, dropping into monologues, whispered invocations, her stories perform in the shadow of a mythic past that can both affirm and confine.

And yet, big as they are, the books are grounded in people, recognizable characters of the Big Island, Nānākuli, Kalihi, China and Korea, their matriarchs and mixed-race children. People who, no matter how far they’ve strayed, or how deep they’ve sunk, know they still do have a home here (however traumatic the thought) in Hawai‘i.

Snows of Mauna Kea of course echoes the title of the famous Ernest Hemingway short story—the one with the famous line about the carcass of a frozen leopard found near the 19,000-foot summit of Kenya’s holy mountain, “The House of the Gods,” Kilimanjaro. It’s an extraordinary story to revisit (or read for the first time), moving from a dying present to a vividly hallucinated past. Davenport’s wry wit is apparent in her sly transplanting of Kilimanjaro to Mauna Kea, another holy mountain brooding above a land traduced by colonialism, violated by thrill-seekers.

“No one knows why it is there at such an altitude,” muses the dying Hemingway character of the frozen leopard. But, as a writer, of course he knew why. Writers always seek the highest peaks; or, at least, that’s what the great ones do.

Snows of Mauna Kea is Davenport’s great hike to the summit. To keep her company as she prepares the final version of the manuscript, bucking the current climate for smaller stories, fewer characters, less glory, let’s savor this first taste and cheer her on. And celebrate the conclusion of her Native Hawaiian Quartet.

—D.W.

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Part One

MAHUKA (Fugitive)
Waipi‘o Jungle, Big Island, Hawai‘i. 2004

“…Fog drifts in, with the strange, aloof acuity of dreams. She inhales, feeling it rearrange her liquids. Nature’s convulsions, its wild rhythms, soften the cadence of her speech. Her words shrink to the embryo of words. Her human odor fuses with the scent of plants, the acrid smell of soil. Around her the jungle glows, smoldering with soft fires of phosphorescent fungus. Above her, night sky, an ocean of plankton and diatoms. From somewhere, the soft cello sounds of a nose-flute. Memories arise unbidden, reminding her how she had failed life’s test.

One night Mo‘o, the Lizard God, lifts his head, the moon reflected in one eye… signifying that her time has come. She gazes at her child, at the warped prism of their existence. Each tale she has told her hides another tale she could not tell. Yet the child is watchful and knowing; thus, between them an equipoise has grown. A sense of the fleeting, infinitesimal wisp of their time together. It is all the life they will ever have…”

For years she had been a woman on the run, surviving by scavenging—sucking out fetuses from gecko eggs, scooping up termites from rotting trees, and consuming them. Sustenance, the simple intake of food, had become a litany, an art.

Her skin was often ripped and raw, sticky from tree trunks weeping resin where wild pigs had gashed them with their tusks. Her eyelids bled from insect bites. Still, her senses were alert to the sound of bounty hunters, to their acrid smell of adrenaline. In an instant, she could step into a hollow tree and become the tree, or burrow into the ground like an animal. At such times her features changed; she became a thing that no longer belonged to her time, or to her species.

In the years before she became a fugitive, men’s eyes had followed her like plants following light, for she was beautiful and tempestuous, though born with the heart of an anarchist. Now only the eyes of wildlife followed her—barking deer, hawk, boar—her instincts as sharp as theirs because she was hunted. They seemed to sense this and froze when she froze, listening for sounds at the farthest point of her antenna.

In the early days of her running she had been mindless and raw, a woman with no context. But when she understood she was carrying a child, her instincts grew razor sharp. Sensing the approach of a hunter, she melted into the shadows, adrenaline firing her brain so she feared her downcast eyes might melt in their sockets. At night she fought off deadly mosquitoes and flies attracted to her blood-filled womb. Her lover had been dead three months, abandoning her and the superabundance of her body to impenetrable jungles and forbidding marshlands. That is when her child decided to bid farewell to non-existence.

One night the woman, Vanya, stood helpless as her water broke. In spite of wracking pain she quickly fashioned a tent by planting long sticks in the earth over which she draped ragged sarongs, then camouflaged them with thick liana vines and elephant-ear leaves. There, on a mildewed mat she squatted, gasping as her hips creaked and the infant came. Even as its head crowned between her thighs, she feared the child was doomed, descended from people forever on the run. She bit off the umbilical cord, ate the placenta, and named her daughter Punahele. Favored One. For she would need all the favors of the gods to survive this life into which she had been born. 

Often, she imparted to her their family history.

“Auwe, (alas) child! You will be forever looking over your shoulder. For we have always been hunted, going back to the time of your great-grandfather, Duke, and great-grandmother, Pono, who were pursued by leper-hunters. And even further back and back—our ancestors hunted down when struck with smallpox, syphilis, diseases brought by foreigners. Once caught, they were kenneled away like dogs until they died.”

While Vanya softly whispered, the infant gazed at her with the relentless amber of her father’s eyes, a man who had sacrificed his life for Vanya and thus would never know what he had spawned, or if it lived. She would be the solitary birther and protector, but long before that, the stitcher of his shroud.

Cloying taste of mother’s milk, the firmness of her nipples. Roughness of her hands, hoof-hardness of her barefoot soles. These were the child’s first memories. And in wet season, the sense of shedding skin as clothes rotted off their backs. From birth, her skin was dark like her mother’s. And like her mother, the slender limbs of a Hawaiian/Filipina. Yet, her amber eyes and knotted hair like tarnished gold bespoke another blood. 

Her white Australian father, Simon Weir, had been raised in the Kakadu rainforests by Aborigines. Thus, Punahele’s strange coloring, and her prodigious embrace of nature. She grew up a wild thing, running on all fours with feral pigs until they accepted this squealing creature as their own. Vanya would find her asleep in a brood of baby piglets while the mother was off savaging guava plants. Or she would find her riding the backs of barking deer while they foraged in the trees.

Early on, the child understood that their lives were circumscribed within an eight-mile radius of jungles and swamps set high above inaccessible sea cliffs. Each day Vanya educated her to the primeval terrain of Kohala Mountain: their refuge at the northern tip of the Big Island. Though now extinct, over one million years ago Kohala had been the largest, most violent, active volcano on the island. Through a thousand millennia its molten lava had hardened and ceased to flow, and from its peaks great waterfalls had cataracted down, so powerful they created huge gorges, treacherous canyons and jungled ravines that spanned seven spectacular valleys extending eight miles across Kohala’s slopes. 

Ancient Hawaiians named the valleys Waipi‘o, Waimanu, Honopue, Honoke‘a, Honokāne Iki, Honokāne Nui, and finally Pololū, where Kamehameha was born, Hawai‘i’s first king who united all the islands. Each valley poured down to the sea, ending in sheer lava cliffs a thousand feet high, making the beaches below inaccessible. The impenetrability of Kohala’s rainforests and canyons insured the safety of Vanya and her child.

Most forbidding of all, each valley boasted almost two hundred inches of rainfall a year, rendering the ground bog-like and treacherous. Only seasoned hunters ventured here, and those forgetful of the terrain were sucked down by moss-covered swamps, or slashed to pieces by towering razor-grass. Drawn by their screams and the smell of blood, wild pigs sat at the edge of the swamps and waited. Not even the hunter bones were found. 

In winter the damp, frigid ground offered no comfort, so the mother and child were forced to live life suspended. From scrappy ‘ōlapa and ‘ōhi‘a trees, they hung hammocks for sleeping. From giant ferns and branches they built platforms that elevated them high above the inhospitable ground. For months of each year the child gazed down at earth with the wondrous sensation of flying. In later years she would tell her own child that she had been born aloft of a woman endowed with mythic wings.

Occasionally they came across letters written in code, stuck in the elbows of trees or under rocks. Families trying to track a loved one—a leper, or drugger, or combat vet—amongst the dozens of dropouts and fugitives subsisting in the jungles. No such letters were left for Vanya. Ten years previous, she had inadvertently killed a federal agent and was forced to run, to cut all communication with her family. In time, word spread across the island that she had perished with her lover.

Only once were her cousins obliquely informed that she had survived, when they were delivered a large black pearl, a family heirloom that she had inherited. After that, only silence, and as years passed they feared she had indeed succumbed to hunger, exposure, a failure of the will to live. In fact, it was the existence of Punahele that gifted Vanya with a fierce determination to press on while she planned her daughter’s future.

An old pig-skinner, Waipi‘o Jimi, occasionally tracked Vanya in his ti-leaf rain cape slung over one shoulder toreador-style. As a young man, he had smuggled food and supplies to her grandparents, Duke and Pono, when they were running from leper-hunters. Now he often brought Vanya slabs of cured pork, and deer skins tanned and softened by his sons. His family were kama‘āina, old-timers, whose ancestors had escaped to Waipi‘o Valley over two centuries ago rather than succumb to Christian missionaries determined to “civilize” their people. To Hawaiians the word “civilize” had come to mean Holoi. To Erase.

In return for his gifts, Vanya taught Waipi‘o Jimi rudimentary English with which to embellish his Pidgin when he bargained for produce with farmers in Honoka‘a, a cowboy town just beyond the jungle. When Punahele was born, Vanya had made a silent vow, though it would take years to fulfill. A vow that would involve Waipi‘o Jimi. 

Much of their daily lives were conducted silently, she and the girl communicating in sign language and grunts. They especially avoided sunlight which reflected perspiration on a face or naked arm, visible from miles away in powerful binoculars. In her early years on the run that was how bounty hunters had nearly captured Vanya, until she learned to detect their heavy footsteps, to scent their acrid sweat from a distance.

Most of them did not track at night, the jungle terrain too treacherous. Plus, there were rumors that the fugitive woman could see in the dark, that she kept her machete razor-sharp. Thus, each evening, and in the softest voice, Vanya read to Puna from ragged newspapers and magazines Waipi‘o Jimi brought her. Inside makeshift shelters, or small caves overhung with vines—by gaslight or flashlight—she spent hours pointing to objects in photographs, then whispering their corresponding names. Gradually, the girl began to associate words with objects. Eventually Vanya divulged the greatest mystery of all—how letters on the page combined to make words, and how those words created sentences. 

A precocious child, she soon grasped the alphabet, and began to speak and think in rudimentary English and Hawaiian. “A” was for ‘āina, the land most precious to its people. “A” was also for ‘aumakua, each family’s god, of which Vanya’s family’s had always been manō, the shark. “H” was for ho‘ohuli! which meant revolution, to overthrow. And so on.

Their survival would always be predicated on a kind of sixth sense, so that as she matured Puna learned to listen with a third ear, see with a third eye, feel with a second skin. When they heard footsteps approaching, she froze, as if the blood had petrified in her veins. Never did she ask her mother why they were running, what had been their sin? In her early years she merely thought of them as wildlife, like feral goats or pigs: creatures meant to be consumed, thus stalked by men with rifles.

For a time she thought that she and her mother might be lepers: their limbs a constant relief-map of scrapes and scars. Though a vaccine now prevented the spread of the disease, it had come too late for the misshapen faces and distorted limbs of aging lepers who lived in the jungle rather than face revulsion from the outside world. Sometimes their families bringing supplies encountered this dark, beautiful woman and her child. She displayed no telling leper sores; her fingers had not deformed to claws. What, then, had been her crime? Why was she running? 

One day Vanya covered Puna’s ears, rose to her full height and seeded her answer with the brief alchemy of truth. “The FBI agent… who died…”

Hands flew to their mouths as folks remembered her story. Mid-1990s, Hawaiian activists protesting the theft of their lands by blowing up hotels and golf resorts. The FBI pursuing them; one of its agents shot and killed. They remembered families across the island kneeling and praying as Vanya fled into the jungles.

Puna’s queries about their fugitive life persisted. Yet Vanya would not tell why they lived on the run, or what her crime had been. The mystery of her mother deepened. In the wavering chiaroscuro of the jungle’s triple canopy, the girl learned to distrust what she saw: the way forms appeared and disappeared. The way sun-struck leaves glittered and danced, then suddenly turned dark and still. One night, separated from her mother, she stumbled against a branch that metamorphosed into the cold, hard metal of a rifle. Men ran flashlights up and down her body.

“Not her,” one of them whispered. “Just a kid. Reward is for older wahine.”

Another man advanced and growled. “What your name, girl? What you doin’ in Waipi‘o? Growin’ pakalolo? Running ‘crack’ for local no-goods?...” he asked.

He stepped closer. She had already rinsed into the dark. 

As the girl approached her tenth year, Vanya trembled, knowing that soon she would have to let her go. She drew her close and began to resurrect her past, the missing portion of their tale.

“Child, in the long-ago I was a lawyer. Do you understand? Yes, like folks we have seen in the papers. In those days I was respected! For years I fought hard to improve our people’s lives. But I grew impatient, lost sight of my goal, and anger took its place. Then violence called to me, the way a woman is called to... say, midwifery. I accidentally killed a man and became a fugitive. Your father, Simon, gave up his life to run with me…”

Vanya bowed her head, every cell in her body still aching for this man. A haole, of the white race she had most detested all her life. Still, she had grown to love him beyond all reason. Even as he died in her arms in the deep night of Waipi‘o, she heard the WUP! WUP! of helicopters searching for her. (Now, after a decade, the FBI had shifted their sights to global terrorists, and left the capture of the agent-killer to bounty hunters.)

In the shock of Simon’s death, the trauma of burying him, the realization that she was carrying his child, Vanya had not had time to dwell on what had killed him, his slow and agonizing suffocation. A man of flat, Antipodean vowels, first he lost the ability to speak, then to breathe properly as his organs failed, a deterioration that had started years earlier in Vietnam when, as an Australian combat soldier, he was exposed to Agent Orange. Years later, Waipi‘o’s humidity and dense jungle vegetation rotted his weakened lungs and they collapsed. She was still haunted by the awful wheezing and gasping as he died. Now all she had left of him was their child, and the only way to save her was to banish her.

At night she studied the sleeping girl, fingers traveling her lovely face, the delicate outline of her shoulders. ...My little hapa-haole (part-white) mongrel. Will you survive outside? Or will the rabid world consume you?... Struck by the actuality of what she was about to relinquish, Vanya wept.

For days she stood bowed in contemplation, wondering who of her family would assist her after a decade of silence. Who of them still cared? In the early years, the FBI had harassed them, kept them under tight surveillance. When runners appeared in the jungle bringing messages from her cousins, trusting no one, Vanya had prudently vanished into the undergrowth. Only once did she entrust a runner with a large black Tahitian pearl—a family heirloom—proof to her cousins that she had survived. 

After that she was silent for ten years. Not even a coded missive telling of her newborn. Rumors spread through the towns that she had perished. Perhaps even her family believed it.

Now, night after night she wondered, Who will forgive me? Who of them will take my child?

She thought of the cousins she had most cherished—Ming, Rachel, Jess—and the summers spent at their grandmother’s sprawling plantation house in the coffee-growing hills of Captain Cook. Summers that formed them and marked them, as did their forbidding grandmother, Pono, a massive woman feared as kahuna, a sorcerer, who walked with a cane made from the spine of a white foreman who had raped her.

In her life, Pono had endured everything to be with her great love, Duke Kealoha, a leper hidden away on the island of Moloka‘i. Honoring a promise, she had never divulged his existence to their daughters, a vow that had warped their lives forever. Only when Pono was nearing death did she explain to her granddaughters who their grandfather was, and what he was. 

After being kenneled away in a leper colony for sixty years, he had finally been released, his body ravaged, limbs deformed. Still, he carried himself with dignity, a perverse magnificence, and his granddaughters had worshipped him. When his strength began to fail, he and Pono died the way they had loved, in secret, in the forbidden waters of Shark Bay, surrounded by Pono’s ‘aumakua, family dieties—the golden-eyed, sacred white sharks of royalty, known as niuhi.

Vanya brooded on the memory of Pono. ...Who would have loathed my child, fathered by a haole... She thought of Ming, the spiritual cousin who would have loved the girl. But Ming was long dead, ravaged by lupus and opium addiction. She thought of Rachel, the family beauty, wealthy widow of a Yakuza, Japanese Mafia. But Rachel’s vanity had always precluded the patience required for a child.

Finally, there was Jess with whom Vanya had shared a deep love/hate. Vanya, volatile, dark-skinned, resenting Jess’s haole mannerisms, her pale hapa-haole half-white skin, her once-privileged life in New York City. Jess, envious of Vanya’s voluptuous “native” features, her daring and passion, her flawless command of their Mother Tongue. Each of mixed blood, they were opposite sides of a coin, competing for Pono’s attention while she had disdained them both as mongrels.

…Yet, when Pono called me ‘she-dog slut,’ because of all the men, it was Jess who had brazenly defended me. And in the end, I loved her best. We were half of each other’s blood; what happened to one, happened to the other… 

And to everyone’s surprise, it was ultimately Jess to whom Pono had bequeathed her coffee plantation when she decided to die. “You will step into my footprints,” she commanded. “You will be Kahu O Ka ‘Āina. Guardian of the Land. YES! YOU.”

Vanya had most closely resembled Pono in beauty and temperament, but Jess was more settled, more responsible. From girlhood she had revered every tree, every handful of soil on Pono’s land, and somewhere between youth and middle age she had quit New York City and returned home to the Big Island where she belonged. After Pono died, she had barely assumed her duties as Kahu O Ka ‘Āina when Vanya’s fugitive years began.

Vanya hung her head, acknowledging that Jess had always been her champion. Now Jess would save her child. And finally, Vanya could rest. From running. From living like a savage. She could simply step out of the frame. Yet there was hesitation. Was giving her child away honorable, or even wise? Hawaiians did not give away their flesh and blood.

One night she sought wisdom from a large pōhaku, a stone, so sacred to Hawaiians. In ancient times, when inter-island wars destroyed marine life, depleted the fields and left common people starving, they had been driven to eat stones, scraping them into shavings which they slowly ingested, the minerals nourishing them, so they survived. In that way Hawaiians became known as ‘Ai Pōhaku. Stone Eaters. In times of plenty, the people did not forget. They watered their stones, built shrines to them. Deferentially, they knelt and prayed to them. And now and then, the stones spoke back. 

During these fugitive jungle years Vanya had honored pōhaku, stroking them gently when she passed, watering them when days were hot and dry, asking permission to lean on them when she was weary. Now she knelt, pressed her forehead to a large pōhaku and prayed, asking if she was wise to release her daughter into the world, to have Jess raise her. The stone was silent.

Exhausted, Vanya fell asleep. But during the night, something gently stroked her head, and ever so faintly a voice spoke out in Mother Tongue.

“Ho‘akahele! Ho‘akahele!” Beware. Beware. “Ka no‘ono‘o akahele!” Move with careful consideration. “Aka, mai pili pu ka hanu!” But, do not hold the breath in fear.

She understood the stone was warning that she was releasing her daughter into a world that might corrupt her. But to keep her here, deprived of life, would doubly corrupt her. It had been years since she touched pen to paper. Still, when Vanya woke, she withdrew from a pouch a pen and ancient sheet of paper.

“Beloved Jess, 

Kala mai ai‘u! Yes, I am alive! I beg you, forgive my decade of silence, I saw early that the white man’s payback-lust was quitless. Bounty hunters. Tracking dogs. In time I learned to trance their dogs with trails of pig blood. Still the bounty hunters came. I understood I had to disappear, to ‘die.’ The years have been long. Only memories have been kind.

My last message to you was encompassed in one word, “IMUA.” Press on, with no hesitation! It excites my heart to hear that you have carried on Pono’s legacy, caring for the old plantation house and Pono’s coffee orchards in the misty blue hills of Captain Cook. The life of each of us began before our summers in that house, but that is what I remember as our beginning. O! I miss our innocence. And I have wept for missing you. 

In all these years I have not chanced to compromise you by writing. Now, in desperation I call upon your generosity. Cousin, I beg you to assist me, to help keep the best part of me alive. You were always brave and true, so I pray that what I now request will not cause havoc in your life. That, after all this time, you still care enough to honor my wish.

I have a child from Simon Weir, born here in the wilds. Her name is Punahele. I offer her to you. She is ten years old, beautiful and bright. She vibrates with a constant curiosity. There is nothing more I can teach her. No more knowledge I can give her. This running life has exhausted my passions, sucked the marrow from my bones. My only hope now is to save my daughter’s life, deliver her from these jungles where I am doomed to run until I die. Prison would be, for me, a double-death. 

You can offer Puna a life of riches—book-learning, music, the company of humans, and a deep sense of Hawaiian pride—Ha‘aheo! Pono taught us that we are all one blood. So, the best parts of you are also in this girl.

My dearest Jess, please accept her! As long as she lives, I live. I wait to hear from you.

Me Ke Aloha Pau‘ole. With love that does not die.

Your Cousin,Vanya.”

Days later, she intercepted Waipi‘o Jimi and his grandson tracking with their hounds. The boy regularly carried messages from Waipi‘o fugitives to their families in towns across the Big Island. Vanya entrusted to him the letter to her cousin in the town of Captain Cook.

A sunless day. A mauka cloudiness. Jess Kealoha looked out across acres of her coffee trees usually filled with racketing mynah birds. Now the trees were eerily still. Even her restless boar-hounds lay still. Below her land, far down Napo‘opo‘o Road, the waves of Kealakekua Bay had died. The sea gray, supernaturally calm. Jess’s migrant workers, usually boisterous Filipinos and Mexicans, stood silent in the fields.

She wondered when the storm would come, if it would erase her sense of impending doom. That week a groundskeeper had watched a corpse step out of a grave. “Bugga’ just got up and walk away!” Across the fields, millions of worms had emerged from the ground and swayed like dancers, phenomena that always presaged heavy storms. 

Finally, the storm broke. It rained nonstop for days, such lokuloku (flooding) rains that they uprooted trees. Tourists disappeared in flash floods. But, when the rains were pau, the earth felt new and clean. Once again, fields were filled with chattering mynahs, rustling palms, the laughter of workers in the orchards.

Still, Jess was stalked by a deep sense of foreboding. She had inherited certain gifts from her Grandmother Pono, one of which was a hardy little seed of sensing, though not quite seeing, the future. The days grew hectic, workers pressured by tight schedules of picking, sorting and drying coffee beans on ancient hosidanas. For a while she ignored her trepidations.

But one day as she stood gripping her human-spine cane—legacy from Pono—the cane began to vibrate in her hand, so violently that her whole body shook. When it finally grew still, Jess looked up. A young man on horseback had entered the gates of her property and was trotting up the drive. Sometime later Kimchee, the cook, found Jess collapsed on the lawn, her cheeks wet, her body rocking to and fro as she grasped to her chest, a letter.

Weeks passed before the pig-hunter’s grandson returned to Waipi‘o Valley. Shortly thereafter, Waipi‘o Jimi sat with Vanya, his cataracts shining in moonlight as he handed her a letter. She stared at it and wept, the handwriting still familiar after all these years. Jess wrote that she accepted Punahele as her kuleana, her sacred responsibility. She would be her kahu, her guardian and protector. The girl was her blood, and she would guard her with her life. E Ola Au I Ke Akua! So help me God! 

She advised Vanya that she would officially adopt the girl, enroll her in school, and bestow on her every possible privilege. Through the years she had taken in orphaned children, so no one would suspect she was Vanya’s child. Jess was already arranging for trusted guides to bring Punahele out of the jungle when Vanya was ready.

“We have been dead without you...” Jess wrote. “...Our grief has been five generations deep... Now our blood will flow again.”

 “Ha‘ina ‘Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana! Let our story continue!…”

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“Since my bestselling novel, Shark Dialogues, was published in 1994, through the years I have received about 230 letters from readers around the globe asking what happened to the four cousins in that novel—Ming, Vanya, Rachel, Jess—the granddaughters of Pono—heroine of Shark Dialogues, whose forbidden love for their grandfather, a misshapen leper hidden from the world, propelled the novel forward to its final, emotional scenes. Since then, I have been waiting for the right time to bring back Pono's girls and complete their stories. Finally, with the fight to save our magnificent and sacred Mauna Kea from being destroyed by outsiders proposing to build a monstrous 18-story telescope at its peak, I knew it was time to re-introduce the four cousins—iconoclastic, adjudicated rebels—as they join Hawai‘i’s struggle to preserve our rare and precious lands.

“Critics have called my three big novels, Shark Dialogues, Song of the Exile and House of Many Gods, my ‘Native Hawaiian Trilogy.’ With this fourth novel it becomes my ‘Native Hawaiian Quartet.’”

—K.D.

Copyright © 2024 Kiana Davenport, from Snows of Mauna Kea. (2024). Excerpt published by permission.

Image by Vanessa Fortier.