Kaya of the Ocean

Gr 5 Up–A promising debut fantasy novel. Kaya, 13, has been dealing with a lot. Her anxiety is getting worse and her parents, Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants to Hawaii, are busy running a struggling restaurant. She’s developed a nervous skin-picking habit that she tries to hide from her best friends. When strange things start happening whenever Kaya is around water, she learns that she may be a descendant of a water goddess. Will she be able to control her new power before disaster strikes? Huang has written an excellent story that doesn’t attempt to fit an entire hero’s journey into 250 pages. Instead, readers stay with Kaya on the island as she first discovers her powers and learns to accept them. The characters are diverse without being tokenized, including native Hawaiians and other Asian and Pacific Islander characters. The relationship between Kaya and her bully of a cousin, Anne, feels painfully realistic. Kaya’s reasonable fear of the water and the symptoms of her anxiety blur together sometimes, which can feel like a messy but not unrealistic representation of what it’s like to have an anxiety disorder.