For the world’s wealthiest, Kōpaʻa Island Resort is more than a destination. It’s the ultimate escape. With no cell service or Wi-Fi, the Hawaiian island is a coveted wellness retreat renowned for its persimmon orchard and promises of rejuvenation.
But their dream vacation is Lehua’s nightmare. When her twin sister, Ohia, goes missing, Lehua follows her trail to Kōpaʻa to find her. Instead, Lehua is cut off from civilization—and help—after the island’s boat leaves without her, stranding her with the resort’s lavish guests and enigmatic staff.
As Lehua investigates Ohia’s disappearance, she discovers her missing sister isn’t the island’s only mystery. Kōpaʻa’s rich exterior and sweet persimmons hide its dark plantation past. And Lehua can’t ignore the dreams haunting her each night—nor the warning telling her to leave the island at once. To uncover what happened to Ohia, Lehua will have to unearth the island’s bloody history and face the horrors that lurk within its sugarcane fields—or risk being consumed by them.
Sharply observed and gorgeously written, That Which Feeds Us explores the true cost of paradise as Lehua must fight to reclaim the land, the stories, and the very souls of her people.
A blend of Hawai’ian superstition and historical atrocities, Kendall weaves an eerie tale of twins struggling to find each other while uncovering the uncovered, tragic history of their homeland’s past.
Kendall starts her novel in a morgue, placing Lehua in the vein of procedural heroines like Kay Scarpetta and Claire Washburn-Sayers is a mortuary assistant. Only Kendall sees the dead open their eyes. A quirk of the job that Lehua dismisses but Kendall immediately uses this jump-scare to introduce the Hawai’ian concepts around spirits and the dead. Spirits are readily believed and are almost a normal concept.
However, Lehua has very little connection to that side of her. Her mothe left her and her twin to go back to Hawai’i, they never heard of her again. They had their grandparents, but they died when Lehua and Ohia were 12, and they ran to avoid foster care. She only knows Hawai’i through stories and other Americanized lens. Moreover, she never had time to process that as the unstable living style have left their scars on Lehua. She’s reliable, and smart, but has clear insecurities as she compares herself to her very successful, future Olympian twin. Lehua thinks she’s bringing her down.
So Ohia’s disappearence is sudden and unnatural and makes readers invested. Ohia has everything ahead of her, so she can’t just be a runaway. But Lehua doesn’t have much trust in the system especially when it comes to women of color and decides to investigate on her own.
Kendall uses a drip-drop method in feeding readers information on Lehua and Ohia. As her investigation into the Kōpaʻa resort deepens, Lehua realizes Ohia had been keeping secrets from her too. Everyone on the island is keeping secrets and she can’t place all the spookiness on her isolation. Something is truly wrong on the resort.
Kendall’s descriptions of the island are lush in weird contrast to the rich, entitled guests at the resort. At first, they seem like your typical privileged, oblivious, snobby elite but their selfishness gains a sadistic taint the longer Lehua stays. That coupled with what she learns of the restort’s history makes it clear that history is repeating itself. Kendall did very well relying on the haunted house trope (or in this case haunted hotel and resort) with its secret rooms and mysterious guests. She leans on the psychological horror aspect to leave a omnipresent threat looming over Lehua and what may have happened to Ohia.
There are bits of botanical horror, ritual sacrifice and spirits getting revenge that will satisfy readers who’d like more blood. However, the visceral punch of those tropes are mitigated by the slower pace. Ie. the psychological horror is more effective than the descriptions of physical horror as she builds so much with the slow-burn that the actual scare is anti-climatic. Sometimes imagination is better at filling the blanks than description.
I enjoyed the sharp contrast as it highlighted the themes of exploitation and commodification by the rich that appears to be beautiful from the outside but rot soon sets in (remember this because it will be repeated. A lot. It got a bit annoying after awhile. However Kendall’s prose in regards to the sensory terror was evocative). For all they say that the resorts bring in jobs and colonialism brought progress, it only benefited the select few rather the indigenous inhibitants.
Resort employees like Daisy, Coiye and Melia serve as mirrors to Lehua regarding her Hawai’ian identity. What happens to those who silently submit under the oppressors, those who become complicit in order to save themselves, and Melia, someone who is equally unsure about her place in the diasphora but wants to know more. Only her ignorance leading to ruin.
The brief connection between Lehua and Melina was sweet as it served to give Lehua something of an ego boost and reccognize the good parts of herself outside of Ohia and that others will see admire her for her. Ohia is also well-rounded and the focus on their fractured relationship mimicking the fractured connection Lehua had with her heritage and her mother was a nice touch.
The title is apt in Kendall’s exploration of colonialism. The horror hits because it’s based on real atrocities and the effects of it aren’t fictional. Secrets cannot stay buried which is a repeated mantra like “that which feeds us” referencing how indigenous Hawai’ians believed in caring for the land would lead to prosperous lives for all the community. If one mistreats the land, it will seek vengence, and Kendall’s prose makes the historical memory come alive just as the island wakes up to correct the wrongs of the missionaries and their descendants.
Perfect for fans of Mexican Gothic, and The White Lotus series exploring similar themes of the exploitative tourist industry, identity diasphora and displacement with the intimate urgency of one women trying to find her sister.
4 stars
Also check out my interview last year with the author, Keala Kendall https://rachelreadsreviews434255182.com/2025/01/27/keala-kendall-interview/
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