Lava A Novel

A haunting tale of obsessive love, and how an otherwise strong young woman releases herself from it. What if you lived in a world where you could wake the dead, where men had a shark jaw buried in their backs just as the shark god did when he stepped on the shore and became human? A place where scalding lava ran through the streets of the town and down into the hissing sea. Where women picked up guns and never put them down again, where it rained three days out of three, and ghosts drank from the rain gutters and huddled under the eaves of the wooden buildings. What if you lived in a town like that? It would still just be Hilo. Memory and desireand how the two can be mistaken for each otherare the themes of this magical novel set in Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii. At the novel's beginning, Kinau says of her husband, gone five years and with another woman, "I could not tell if I was possessed more by Ivan's absence than by the man himself." But then a bizarre incident brings Ivan back, and a new chain of passion and leave-taking inevitably spins itself out. The early novels of Susannah Moore come to mind, along with the dreamlike quality of Christine Garcia's work. Though Pamela Ball's style is elegant and poetic, her enclosed world is rife with bloody history and mythology, filled with highly dramatic events. Kinau's life is shaped by the stories and feral energy of her mother (a woman of many husbands) and by the always hovering and jealous presence of the gods. Revenge for a boy's accidental death calls for a bounty on sharks and results in a fishing frenzy. Tidal waves have wrought havoc, and will again. A volcano carries its own portentous message. And finally, there is Hawaii itself, source of loss, of risk, and possibly of salvation.