Review: The Killing Spell

The Killing Spell by Shay Kauwe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a pretty interesting fantasy debut, dealing with language and magic, assimilation and colonization. The author is a native Hawaiian. I think this book illustrates the value of so-called "Own Voices," or people other than generic white authors publishing stories reflecting their ethnic groups and cultures. I doubt a white person could have written anything like this.

In this future, the Hawaiian Islands have been destroyed by an apocalyptic Flood, and the native survivors are living in and around Los Angeles. The Flood also released magic into the world, a magic that depends on languages and linguistics. The future federal government cannot cope with this at all, and a governing Board and Guild is established in LA to police and ultimately control magic users. There are eight recognized magical languages: Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese. Magical practitioners speaking these languages are highly regulated, and Casters or Smiths (the two designated levels of magical users) must be licensed within city limits to be able to practice their magic.

Our protagonist is Kealaokaleo Petrova, a young unlicensed Smith living on Homestead, a coastal region where the last remnants of the Hawaiian people settled after they were displaced. Homestead is rife with magic (called "mana" in this world) and magic-spawned monsters, and Kea is the struggling leader of her clan, trying to work and help her family survive. She is abruptly dragged in to see the Board (by the other protagonist, the Chinese Caster Sora Kaiser) because a murder has been committed: murder by magic, by someone spellcasting in an unregulated language. They have no proof it was done by Kea, but suspicion is falling her way, and she agrees to hunt down the murderer to spare her people from the Board's wrath.

There's some interesting worldbuilding here, built on languages and particularly the Hawaiian language, which does not have a written form. The author herself being Hawaiian gives the story an extra authority, as the reader can trust she knows what she's talking about. The impacts of colonization are also explored, along with the greed and hubris of those who have power and think they can dictate to others they view as "lesser."

This is a first novel, so it does have some hiccups, but overall it's a promising debut. It will be interesting to see what the author comes up with next.

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