you know how they recently created an entirely new genre called cozy fantasy? well i’m gonna start a new one called cozy horror and make this the top of the list—and not because it is cozy in a feel-good sense; quite the opposite, actually—but because i so delicately relate to the pressing anxieties lathered in this book like warm shampoo through untangling hair. i see myself embroidered in the discomfort and the brutal reality of dysfunction, and it’s not to make me feel like a stitch out of place, but as a welcome disturbance. i feel at home in the horror, and that is something not all books set out to achieve—to show you a mirror and tell you it’s okay to look. you are still yourself even in the darkness.

all that to say it was deeply personal for me and i enjoyed it very much. this book is invaluable as a cultural asset, touching upon themes of racism, systemic injustice, loneliness, beliefs, and undiscovered identity, all wrapped tightly in fear and exposed one by one like laying out your meal on a picnic table, waiting to be devoured. except it’s dark and your companions are the forgotten ghosts that the system was built to ignore, ghosts who had a name once. this book is a platform for them.

i gasped, cried, slammed the book and went to sleep angry, laughed silly, stood in the corner of my room and dislodged myself from reality. you name it, i’ve been there 😀👍🏼

kylie lee baker has created a gruesome, yet tantalizing story for me and all the others who have 0-2 friends, the youngest sibling whose decisions are somehow always chosen for us, who kin courage the cowardly dog, who still use masks in 2026. she has become my new fave author (this is my second book of hers!). what she does, she does well, and i’m seated for all of it 😌

what stayed with me most after reading this book isn’t the magical and mystical moments that we see in the book, although the descriptions of the hula are mesmerizing; it is how heavy the burden must be to ensure your culture survives, the burden of loyalty, the burden of historical trauma.

many of us fortunately have never had to carry generational responsibility to this degree—that one day you will wake up and realize that your culture may die if you let it, that only you and a few other families are what’s left of it if you do not pass down the traditions you grew up with to the next generation, to instill in them the importance of this knowledge that they must also pass down.

for these characters, that’s what it’s like living in hawaiʻi. they reflect the real and tangible experiences of native hawaiians today. their fight to keep breath in the lungs of their culture is intertwined with their land. when you take away the land, you effectively erase the life that was built upon it, the traditions that were built because of it.

and to carry this weight of responsibility alone is not an easy task. there’s a reason why there are pov switches in the book and one of them belongs to the community as a whole, watching generations of women go through love and loss, partaking in community/political events, offering their opinions and their knowledge to us as readers. the community’s generational voice is as important to the framing of the story as the main characters are.

multiple times, hakes uses the words “accidental” when describing native hawaiians as activists. they never wanted to be. they were forced to be political because they were introduced to politics by violence. they had to involve themselves in the meetings so they could hear what these people were going to do to their land, and effectively, how they were going to continue erasing their people, in order to stop it, prevent it, to dismantle a system built without their permission.

the land is as hawaiian as its people are. you destroy one, you destroy the other. there is no separating them.

this book opened my eyes in numerous ways and made me shed tears in many moments. i loved the mix of history within the chapters, the local tidbits you can’t google to get the meaning of, the pidgin to da max kine language no one wen explain.

overall, the responsibility is not the only thing inherited, whether intentional or not. grief that is consumed by one generation is passed down, shaped into a new form for the next, and so on.

and just like any other hula, these stories will be told.