I greatly enjoyed The Killing Spell, the debut urban fantasy novel by Shay Kauwe. I’ll admit that the first chapter was a little challenging for me, because the protagonist, Kea Petrova, starts out feeling a bit overwhelmed by her family responsibilities as the young head of a household, with siblings and cousins to support, and a somewhat unreliable magical talent. She continues to be off balance and seemingly gets in over her head when a political activist is assassinated and she becomes responsible for figuring out the killing spell and tracking down the killer, but eventually she hits her stride and finds some allies. She learns that she is most powerful when she stops trying to do everything by herself and leans into her heritage and her people’s connections with nature.
Kea is not perfect; she’s impulsive and lets her smart mouth get her into trouble. The spells that she crafts often go astray, and she is both self-doubting and usually too proud to ask for help or be very diplomatic. However, she’s very strong-willed, which ends up being an extremely good thing. She loves her family and her refugee community, surviving on the outskirts of Los Angeles some two hundred years after the Hawaiian islands were inundated; moreover, she is determined to keep what independence they have instead of letting L.A. assimilate them and split them up.
The worldbuilding in this book, in which all magic is language-based, is really interesting. Kea dreams of becoming a certified spellsmith, but her native Hawaiian is not recognized as a legitimate spellcasting language by the L.A. Casters Board, which favors Latinate (European) languages and only occasionally and very reluctantly recognizes others, due to prejudice and not wanting to grant power to anyone they see as less civilized. Linguistic scholarship doesn’t come easily to Kea, even in her own tongue. Before the flooding that brought magic into (or back into) the world, many Hawaiians didn’t speak their own native language, only English (which doesn’t work for spells), and since magic is tied to language, they’re handicapped now as spellcasters as well as financially poor descendants of refugees.
The assassination victim was a leader of Filipinos, another group that has been working on recognition for their language, Tagalog. Nobody saw it happen, but there’s a partial recording that shows the killing spell was spoken in Hawaiian. The Board is inclined to use this as an excuse to break up the Hawaiian community and confiscate their land, but Kea pleads for time to find the killer herself.
Suddenly in the spotlight, Kea struggles to find her footing. One of the Board members is assigned as her partner/watchdog, but he’s reluctant to even talk with her. Other Hawaiians look down on Kea’s family as the smallest and poorest of the survivors, so they’re not very forthcoming. Basilio, a former Hawaiian leader who had previously sold out to the L.A. Board, urges her to just let their takeover happen and salvage whatever she can, instead of fighting to preserve her people.
Basilio is one of those men who are proud of being able to make what he thinks of as tough choices, since the world is such a harsh place. But like many of the board members, he expects the sacrifices to come from other, presumably less significant, people, rather than himself. He thinks fighting to help others is a mug’s game.
However, Kea gets some help from the Filipino leader’s widow, two powerful Board members become interested in her romantically (or at least sexually), and other unexpected allies emerge. Eventually Kea figures out what’s been happening, and what’s really at stake.
One of the strongest themes here is about believing in your community and fighting for it, versus attempting to survive via giving up your heritage/identity and self-assimilating into a dominant culture. Kea’s magic doesn’t become really effective until she realizes that she needs to trust in the stories and traditions of her own people, even when they conflict with the received knowledge of the powerful accredited spellsmiths; reverence for and kinship with the land is a strength, not a liability. And although she’s been jockeying for position with the other Hawaiian family leaders, she realizes that most of them share the same goals.
Kea’s character arc is very enjoyable to watch, along with the romantic entanglements. There’s plenty of heart and humor along with her frustrations. Moreover, the development of the community theme is really well done and heartening. I strongly recommend this book, and I hope we’ll see more from Kauwe.
The Killing Spell, by Shay Kauwe, was published on April 14, 2026, by Saga/Solaris; 304 pages. Order here.
Content warnings: Animal and human deaths, assassination and attempted murders, racial/ethnic/cultural discrimination against the protagonist and other people, combat.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this book for review from the publisher via NetGalley.
