Kikiloa is Mitochondrial Eve, the 200,000-year-old mother of humanity and our lyrical first storyteller.
"An engaging time-travel romp that mashes up Jung and Doctor Who to masterful effect. Our verdict: Get it." â Kirkus Reviews
"Thought-provoking, emotionally resonant, and a refreshing new take. Its unexpected conclusion lingers in the mind. Highly recommended." â The International Review of Books
âWildly imaginative, surprisingly moving, and unlike anything else I've readâKiki's voice stays with you long after the final page. Five Star Award." â The Wishing Shelf
A time surfer flickering across a trillion universes, Kiki is also a freckled San Francisco fourteen-year-old who believes her friend Hazel can cause even death to pass people by. Probably.
When a cliff collapses and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left alone with their attacker to begin her own coming-of-age, while Kikiâs hopes unravel back to Hawaiian tsunamis, ice age floods, and the trauma of her bleak beginnings â outcast and enslaved in a dying prehistoric world.
A wild, tender, philosophically ambitious debut, carried by Kikiâs unmistakable voice from the devastating loneliness of her first life to hard wisdom at the end of time.
Circe meets The Midnight Library by way of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Kikiloa is Mitochondrial Eve, the 200,000-year-old mother of humanity and our lyrical first storyteller.
"An engaging time-travel romp that mashes up Jung and Doctor Who to masterful effect. Our verdict: Get it." â Kirkus Reviews
"Thought-provoking, emotionally resonant, and a refreshing new take. Its unexpected conclusion lingers in the mind. Highly recommended." â The International Review of Books
âWildly imaginative, surprisingly moving, and unlike anything else I've readâKiki's voice stays with you long after the final page. Five Star Award." â The Wishing Shelf
A time surfer flickering across a trillion universes, Kiki is also a freckled San Francisco fourteen-year-old who believes her friend Hazel can cause even death to pass people by. Probably.
When a cliff collapses and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left alone with their attacker to begin her own coming-of-age, while Kikiâs hopes unravel back to Hawaiian tsunamis, ice age floods, and the trauma of her bleak beginnings â outcast and enslaved in a dying prehistoric world.
A wild, tender, philosophically ambitious debut, carried by Kikiâs unmistakable voice from the devastating loneliness of her first life to hard wisdom at the end of time.
Circe meets The Midnight Library by way of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Prelude at the End of Time: I am Kikiloa
I was enslaved after the fire.
I birthed only daughters, more than I could track on my fingers and toes. I remembered them by the dark freckles scattered across the backs of my hands. Iâve since learned to count and know the living were twenty-one daughters by twenty different men.
None of my daughters resembled me until my twenty-first and last. She was the child of a forbidden lover, a man my father killed too late to preserve our tribeâs harmony. She was stillborn in my forty-second year, a speckled blue baby strangled by her umbilical cord. The weight of her lifeless body broke the scales of my grief and freed me.
With age, my freckles multiplied, darkening my skin in a mottled tapestry. Despite timeâs weathering, I can still find each daughter in those scattered marks, an alphabet of memory.
I am Kikiloa.
I am Mother, the harbinger of humanity, ancient yet not atavistic. I forespoke your future, and you echo my past. We share our genes. We share our deepest dreams.
But my life has since multiplied beyond reckoning.
Iâm connected across more of my selves and a longer span of time than the sum of all our lives. With a flicker, I can find you in any moment. And perhaps I found the girl who can save everything.
But Iâm getting ahead of myself, as tricksters do.
Let me tell you what Iâve seen, and some that Iâve surmised.
Iâll start two years before my first taste of toast and chocolate.
Chapter 1 Present Day: I'll Be Quick
Hazel sat alone on the swing set, looking out from the park as the midday sun burned back the wall of fog looming over San Francisco. The cold Pacific breeze curled over the cliff behind her, winding through swaying pillars of cypress and pine to tease at her honeyed hair.
She imagined herself sketched beneath the misty curtain like a conductor before her orchestra. For a moment, she felt the gaze of thousands of people watching the fogâs daily spectacle from windows scattered across the city below, wondering if any could see her. Then she remembered the time and pulled her phone from her backpack.
kiki, ru coming? she texted.
Hazel had grown familiar with my loose attitude toward time. I was late today, but I was just as often early. Iâd once showed up at ten in the morning for a movie that didnât start until six that night. As far as she and everyone else knew, I was a homeschooled free spirit with a bike, a bus pass, mysterious Kenyan parents who were always traveling for business, and a cranky nanny who never answered the phone and never said no. If youâre cute and confident enough, people will believe anything.
While Hazel gave me leeway, sheâd been raised believing that being on time showed respect for others, and she made a habit of sending me helpful reminders. I didnât mind the prompts, but I still showed up when it suited me.
âHey!â I shouted as I emerged from the steep path leading down from the dog park. I bounced across the grass, twirling with outstretched arms, my adolescent body buzzing with energy. I am ancient. Still, in a young body, itâs easy to forget.
Hazel often doodled me as a living spark, my antics jolting with electricity, my tightly crimped cocoa-and-red curls arcing in all directions. I talked in flowing bursts and grinned freely, my pale green eyes shifting with the light, my earrings seeming to glow against my dark-speckled skin like the bioluminescence Hazel remembered from a fateful trip years ago.
âSorry Iâm late. I didnât want to be an uptight wacko,â I deadpanned.
âNo one would call you uptight,â Hazel replied, her blue eyes glinting above cheeks still rounded with adolescence.
âYeah,â I laughed, my body fizzing even while still. âYour parents arenât home, right? Want to climb up to the Penthouse?â I pointed at the cliff bordering the park.
She looked down at her carefully selected school outfit, then slipped off her light pink jacket and stuffed it into her backpack. âSure. My brother has a lacrosse game. They wonât be back for a while.â
âThen letâs go!â I cheered, bounding away toward the dusty scree. Hazel looked down at her carefully mended jeans, shrugged, and followed.
We scrambled up the dark gray rock, angling toward a ledge cut into the cliff forty feet above.
- - - - - - - - - -
The ledge was hidden from the park below. Hazel hadnât known it existed until breakfast the day after her twelfth birthday, when her dad pointed out a small orange tent that had bloomed on the cliff overnight. A man stood outside it, nonchalantly brushing his teeth.
âWow, that guy picked a million-dollar penthouse view,â her dad said. And so, the ledge became the Penthouse.
The man was a topic of family conversations for several days until her mom finally called the police when he relieved himself over the ledge in full view of the park.
It took hours for the police and firefighters to get the man down. No one was willing to climb up after him, so they watched as he calmly packed up his belongings and then scaled down the cliff as if heâd done it a thousand times. His burnt-orange windbreaker caught Hazelâs eye. His face was deeply tanned and clean-shaven. He gave her a lion-yellow wink as the cops escorted him from the park.
âDonât you two climb up there,â Hazelâs mom had warned at dinner that night. âWho knows what he left behind? Needles and, you know⌠stuff.â
Intrigued, Hazelâs brother, Lee, looked out the dining room window and up at the cliff.
âAnd poop,â her dad added, noticing Leeâs interest. âHe was up there for days. Thatâs the âstuffâ your mom means.â
Leeâs nose wrinkled in disgust.
Hazel doubted her dadâs story. The man was the most clean-cut urban camper sheâd ever seen. The day before, sheâd secretly set out a thermos of leftover soup near the path to his ledge. That morning, sheâd found the empty container on their front steps, carefully washed and wrapped in orange craft paper. That didnât seem like something someone who left âstuffâ everywhere would do.
A few days later, Hazel met me for the first time. She spotted me climbing down the rocks below the ledge. Curious, she called out.
âHi! Were you up on that ledge? Is there, uh, poop up there?â
âNope!â I said with a bright smile. âJust a great view, and some sitting stones where the Ohlone wise ones talked story back in the day. Iâm Kiki!â I ended with an enthusiastic click of my tongue.
She smiled back, quizzical and suddenly a little shy. âIâm Hazel.â
- - - - - - - - - -
Hazel clambered over the exposed roots of a large cypress that clung to the cliff ledge, hauling herself up onto the ledge and joining me at a semicircle of sun-warmed sitting stones. Sheltered from the chill breeze by cliff and trees, we shared a bag of roasted seaweed from Hazelâs backpack and played our version of âI Spy.â
The bay gleamed in the bright sun, the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge soaring above a tongue of fog jetting in from the ocean, the dark slopes of Mount Tam rising beyond. Alcatraz hid in the fog, the deep surrounding waters flecked with whitecaps. Directly below, the city marked out intersecting diagonals of pastel neighborhoods backed by mirrored skyscrapers. Cargo ships dotted the bay, disappearing into Silicon Valleyâs bright haze.
âI spy a sunburned bald head,â I said, looking east.
Hazel scanned the park below, but it was unusually empty for this time of day. I held my gaze steady until she spied Bernal Peakâs rust-red hump poking up through the street grid.
âI spy silver rainbows,â Hazel said, leaning back until the city hung upside down behind her.
I quickly spied the shining spans of the Bay Bridge.
I loved our games, but I was stalling. Iâd been stalling ever since we met two years ago, enjoying the childhood friend Iâd never had. But now it was time.
I turned to her, mock-serious. âI spy someone I need to talk to.â I tapped Hazelâs backpack with my toe. âGot any water in there?â
Hazel raised an eyebrow in response and pulled out her water bottle.
âIâll be quick.â I unscrewed the cap, took a sip, and said with a straight face, âLetâs start with this, Iâm not here.â
Hazel waited expectantly, taking back the water, patient with my conversational oddities as always.
Suddenly, a sharp crack sounded deep in the rock ledge beneath us. The colossal cypress shuddered as its roots ripped free from the cliff face, its cantilevered weight dragging a car-sized section of the ledge loose. A fracture ratcheted toward us across the rock shelf, discharging sharp flakes and puffs of dust.
I leapt up and yanked Hazel away from the growing fissure, rolling her over me in a fluid somersault that ended with her sliding to a stop on the solid rock beyond the sitting stones.
âWhoa. Thatâs a big one!â I called out, my eyes unfocusing as I registered a familiar surge emanating from every detail of the scene.
I sprang to the edge near the doomed tree, knees bent and arms out in a surf stance as the ledge tilted further beneath my feet. I flickered in and out. âIt wonât break,â I breathed, then looked uphill and raised an angry fist.
Startled, Hazel followed my gaze and saw a splash of orange â the jacket of a man, vaguely familiar, standing in the dark trees above the cliff with a pickaxe on his shoulder. Did he do this?
Paha gave us a perfunctory wave before turning into the shadows with a glint of his sunglasses.
The tree groaned, tilting further until its trunk stuck straight out from the cliff. Wood and rock popped and squealed under the strain. Several large stones broke free from above the ledge and crashed past us, sparking a hot, sulfurous smell.
âAsshole,â I muttered to myself, shuffling to keep my balance. âWhatâs he playing at? Maybe another âaccidentââŚâ
I turned to Hazel. âYou gotta get out of here.â I flickered again. âDonât worry, youâll survive.â I flickered once more, like a flip book, testing. âProbably.â
âKiki, what is going on?! Come back from there!â Hazel bellied forward, swinging her backpack toward me like a lifeline. âGrab this!â
I flashed a final smile, sidestepping the momentâs pressing weight. âReally, donât worry. Iâll find you later and explain everything. Just go. Go home. Oh, and maybe lock the door.â
I crouched, turning away, then flickered one last time. âYeah. Thisâll do.â
The ledge gave way beneath my feet. I spun, extended my thumbs and pinkies to throw Hazel a double shaka, then fell backward off the cliff, vanishing with a soft snap, as if the air had swallowed me whole.
The empty park echoed with the crash of the falling tree.
"Surfing is an elegy for waves. We honor their ending."
I love books that meet at the intersection of fantasy and reality, and The Kikiloa Chronicles by Erik D. Larson does it brilliantly, opening a door between the mythic and the everyday.
At the center is Kiki, "the outcast daughter of a fearful mother and a thundering headman father", whose story carries us from Africa of the past, through the waves of Hawaii and to present-day California beaches, rendered in rich surfer slang and imagery while she races to stop a rogue time surfer. It's a wide geography for one book, yet everything seems to be pulled along by the same current, tying well in terms of scale with its central narrative of a multiverse.
And what struck me most is how deceptively casual the novel is while handling this. Things for Kiki, or Mother, started two hundred thousand years ago, but time here bends like just another number, where "thirty trillion years go by in a flash." At one point, her place in history is described as "the mother of the human race, the woman called Mitochondrial Eve", and at another, it talks about her love for sourdough toast. The leap from beach-town intimacy to evolutionary myth is dizzying, but it never feels gimmicky or forced. And the underlying metaphor never strays far from water, either: moving from riding tsunami waves to surfing time and meaning itself, finding in Hazel, the girl Kiki bonds with, someone who seems to "catalyze long, wide-reaching branches with waves of meaning that ripple across the multiverse."
The multiverse mechanics can get a little overwhelming early on, but I appreciated how they're grounded in a rather intimate reflection of life, where "every moment leaves its trace, ripples of the past shaping the present". Instead of trying to focus on abstract physics, the storytelling feels like an extension of Polynesian surfing and seafaring culture, keeping the book humane despite its speculative genre. This duality runs through Kiki's name as well. When Paha, her former mentor turned adversary, christens her as a time surfer, he tells her that the name Kikiloa means "far distant in time", as well as, in the same breath, "excessive little squirt." It's a fitting contradiction for a layered story where the impossible weight of saving everything is carried inside a fourteen-year-old body still figuring out how to drive without giving her passengers a conniption.
Between Hanalei Bay's past and California's present, the novel overall runs on rich imagery. The topography is gorgeous throughout, and the book earns its own closing sentiment where "reality's mystery is humbling. All we can do is stay open." Needless to say, this is the perfect novel for the imaginatively restless who want their cosmic stakes rooted in real humanity. Happy reading!