About the Book
“Moving, surprising time-travel story of the fight against entropy. Rewards patient attention.” ⚡ Editor’s Pick— BookLife Reviews by Publishers Weekly
“An engaging time-travel romp that mashes up Jung and Doctor Who to masterful effect.” OUR VERDICT: ✓ GET IT— Kirkus Reviews
Kikiloa is Mitochondrial Eve, the 200,000-year-old mother of humanity and our lonely, irrepressible first storyteller.
She’s also a freckled fourteen-year-old trickster bounding across a San Francisco park to meet her ordinary friend Hazel, who Kiki believes can make death itself pass people by. Probably.
As a time surfer flickering across a trillion universes, Kiki is determined to discover an antidote to entropy before everything meaningful is lost. And she hopes Hazel is the key.
When a cliff collapses beneath them and Kiki vanishes mid-fall, Hazel is left facing the man who attacked them — and the start of a coming-of-age she never asked for. Meanwhile, Kiki’s hope unravels backward through her self-delusions, all the way to her bleak first life as an outcast enslaved in a dystopian prehistoric world.
But Kiki never lets up. She laments a Hawaiian tsunami, alchemizes sniper attacks, tells quantum stories, weaves through highway pileups, goes Jungian, and bakes perfectly average cookies. And through it all, 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 emotionally vast, funny, and wild speculative literary debut. The story is carried by Kiki’s unmistakable voice — from the devastating loneliness of her first life to the hard-won wisdom of friendship. Charming and imperfect, she wrestles with love, a force like gravity, alive at the core of a universe destined for darkness.
“Imaginative, sincere, and bigger on the inside than it first appears.” ★★★★★, Gold Book Award— Literary Titan
Circe meets Douglas Adams in the spirit of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Content Note: This story contains scenes of natural disasters with loss of life, gun violence with young teens in danger, and sexual oppression in a dystopian prehistoric setting. The scenes are not graphic, but readers sensitive to these themes may wish to know in advance. While there are teenage characters and strong adventure plotting, this is a character-driven literary novel for adults and mature teen readers ready for it.
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