Read Keala Kendall’s ‘That Which Feeds Us’ Excerpt

Keala Kendall has made a mark in the publishing world with her incredible Hawaii-set Disneybooks featuring Moana and Lilo & Stitch, but now she’s finally letting her imagination run wild with a heart-pounding new thriller that is set to take you for a ride. With an incredible mix of horror, folklore, and mystery, we dare you to try to put this read down that has one sister testing her own limits as she tries to find her twin at all costs.

Cosmopolitan has an exclusive look at Keala Kendall’s That Which Feeds Us, which is set to be released on May 5, 2026. The novel follows Lehua as she goes to a tropical resort in the hopes to find her missing twin. However, the secrets behind the resort and her disappearance are far more sinister than she had expected. Can she find her before its too late? Or will the island and its history take them both down? Here’s some more info from our friends at Penguin Random House Books for Young Readers:

A native Hawaiian teen travels to a luxury island resort in search of her missing twin and uncovers the dark side of paradise, in this YA supernatural thriller that’s Mexican Gothic meets She is a Haunting.

“This astounding book is both a finger pointed directly at the rotting heart of colonial greed and a truly heart-pounding mystery.” — Andrew Joseph White, New York Times bestselling author of Compound Fracture

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.

Ready to try to uncover the mysteries that are lurking in Kōpaʻa Island Resort? You can check out an exclusive excerpt below! Just make sure to pre-order That Which Feeds Usso you can find out what happens next when its released.

From their view on the trawler, Kōpaʻa had been wreathed in fog. But once on land, Lehua’s first impression of the small island was of the town, carpeted with wild sea purslane, as static and vacantly beautiful as the postcards Lehua and Ohia used to collect during their out-of-town track competitions—an idyllic souvenir of a town preserved in ivy rather than paper.

Along a wide dirt road, a dozen wood-framed houses loomed over the two girls. Red dirt clung to their posts in an ombre of rust to brown, dyeing the wood and sea purslane like poured cider. Thick vines had overtaken the windows, growing over the white walls and a bulletin board full of yellowed fliers whose letters had long faded.

“Looks abandoned,” Lehua said. Despite the faraway lights they’d spied from the ocean, there were no streetlamps and no movement in the houses. They’d have to rely on their phones and the moonlight to find their way.

“Nah, I don’t think it is,” Melia said, tilting her head toward one of the town’s second-floor windows. “I’m pretty sure I saw someone up there.”

The window’s darkened glass revealed nothing but rotten lace curtains, glistening like spiderwebs. Unease skittered down Lehua’s back. “Is someone from the resort supposed to meet us?”

“No,” Melia answered, peering into a window with her phone’s flashlight. The window was painted black and swallowed up the light, reflecting back nothing. “According to the email I got, the resort shouldn’t be far, we just need to follow ‘the road.’”

Lehua nodded. When she left the trawler, she had passed by the captain, a white man in an anorak, and pressed another hundred dollars into his hands, promising she’d return in an hour. The island had looked small from the boat. If her sister was here, that would be enough time to find Ohia, demand she answer her goddamn phone next time, then leave.

But the town had the same abandoned feeling the mortuary had during her night shifts. It was hard to imagine anyone sleeping here, let alone living here. The air tamped down on her chest—thick with humidity, reminding her of Phoenix’s monsoon season when the pressure changed, bruising the city’s skyline purple with ozone and storm clouds.

Lehua resisted wrapping her arms around herself. She pointed at the town’s lone dirt road. “I’m guessing the resort is that way.”

She turned to Melia, finding the girl slack-jawed, gripping a wooden post. Lehua followed her gaze, then froze.

A dead bird was splayed under the house’s awning. Half eaten. It was as big as a falcon and its black plumage was pulled out in wet tufts. Its bright red bill was cracked open and full of dried brown blood. All that was left of its stomach was a pit of rotten pink gore.

“Looks like a cat got carried away. Is that a duck?”

Melia met her queasy look, then shook her head. “No, it’s an ʻalae ʻula. They’re a wetland bird. Endangered, too.” She turned her back to the dead bird with a tight smile. “I read about the old plantation town. For such a fancy resort, I’m surprised they didn’t tear it down. It reminds me of where I grew up.”

“Where’s that?”

“Pāʻia,” she answered. Together, they climbed the red slope running like a vein through the island’s verdant hills, kicking up dust plumes in their wake. “When the sugar plantation there closed, it became a massive surf town, so it’s full of tourists now. But the houses and stores look the same as here. Except for the old mill. After it closed they put a fence around it, but that doesn’t keep anyone out.” Her voice grew low, wistful. “I used to climb the funnel loader alone and watch the lights wink out at night.”

The way Melia talked about Pāʻia reminded Lehua of her grandparents, how they had ached for their homeland every day until they died. Lehua didn’t feel nostalgia for Phoenix, and its red rock and intersecting city roads. Only rank familiarity.

“Sounds dangerous.”

“A couple of rusted buildings?” Melia cast her a sideways look, that wistfulness returned to a brittle edge. “There are worse things.”

There was more going on with Melia than she let on, that much was clear. A girl didn’t island-hop in the night when her life was going great. Lehua had staged enough disappearing acts of her own to recognize that same resolute look in Melia’s eyes. But Lehua didn’t want to think about worse things. Not when her twin was missing.

Her twin who was okay, she reminded herself, and who’d always continue being okay, because Ohia wasn’t the type to run away. When they found Ohia at the end of this walk, she would toss her hair over her shoulder and pierce Lehua with that look of hers—the one that both soothed and unnerved her, that confident half-hooded look her sister had mastered at fifteen. Everything’s fine, Le.

Lehua’s throat tightened. Maybe her sister wouldn’t be glad to see her at all. She shook the thought away. “How’d you hear about this place, anyway?”

Melia glanced at her, then at the path ahead of them where a large net of sugarcane swayed, leaves glinting like silver beneath the moon. Lehua hadn’t meant to pry. She could tell Melia hadn’t liked the question from her long sigh.

“A case worker at the Maui unemployment office told me about it,” Melia said, and Lehua thought she’d leave it at that until she added, “No need to look surprised. I needed a job, and the case worker told me this place is always looking for workers. She went on and on about the handful of people she had sent here and how their lives had changed, saying it was exactly what I needed. The usual crap. I think she wanted me to stop showing up every two weeks.” She snorted. “Well, I sent an email. Here I am.”

That didn’t explain how Ohia, if she was here, had heard about the opportunity. Maybe she’d found the resort online or one of her teammates had mentioned it.

“It seems this resort demands a lot, making their employees move all the way out here.”

“That’s life in Hawaiʻi. You don’t have a lot of options unless you’re here on vacation.”

Lehua felt a pinprick of shame. Melia was her age. At nineteen, they were technically adults, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Melia had been pushed into adulthood suddenly. With her guard down, she looked ropy and small on the dirt path next to her—lost and, if Lehua wasn’t wrong, alone. At least she’d had Ohia after their grandparents died.

In silence, they climbed inland until they were bracketed on all sides by tall grass shoots of sugarcane and another plant Lehua didn’t recognize. Variegated green leaves spiraled out like a lit match from its thick wooden stem. The tall leaves hedged the road, standing like a botanical barricade between them and the cane fields.

“That’s ti leaf,” Melia said, pulling out a water bottle and taking a long sip. “It brings good luck and wards off evil spirits.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a carmine streak of dust.

Lehua looked at the long line of ti leaf. It ran all the way up the hill, continuing over its summit. “They must be really superstitious.”

“What about you? Do you believe?”

Lehua resisted a snort. “Not really, no.”

“What? Why not?”

I work with dead people.

“I work in a mortuary,” Lehua said, yanking off her hoodie. With the gathering dark and nearby sea, she had expected a chill. But the air was hot and wept down her neck. She was used to the heat in Phoenix, where it was a stifling, dry thing. Here it left sweat tracks down her tattooed arms like a second skin. “If there was something beyond this world, I’m pretty sure I’d know about it.”

Lehua tied her hoodie around her waist as Melia took in her tattoos. She had started adding to the inky garden on her arms when she quit college six months ago after she had met an apprentice tattoo artist willing to work for cheap. She wasn’t used to the attention, and her skin burned under the scrutiny.

What does that one mean? people would ask, brazenly brushing their fingers over the shapes on her arms, lingering near her neck. Is that for your parents? Your sister? Your dead grandparents? Are there more?

She’d started with pink mallows and white blooms of asphodel climbing up her triceps, their unopened flower buds, dark anthers, and filaments inked black. Now there were night moths tucked behind their leaves and petals, the edges of their wings feathered and gray, and yellow fruit with freckled skin.

But Melia didn’t ask to see more. Her eyes traced the lilies veining Lehua’s forearms, following the stems that curled into shrubs and ferns cinching her wrists like manacles. “You haven’t seen anything?” Melia’s searching gaze met hers.

Lehua thought of her grandparents and the superstitions she’d buried after their deaths—and the man’s sightless stare that had confronted her that first week at the mortuary. “No.” A flicker of judgment lit Melia’s eyes. “Do you believe?”

“Yes. I’ve seen too many things on these islands to dismiss the possibility.”

Lehua had no reply to that. It felt like the same sort of explanation her grandma would have offered, so she pointed to the upcoming light burning through the dark. “Look. We’re almost there.”

Melia’s shoulders hunched together. She looked like she’d rather be anywhere else. Before Lehua could ask why Melia had taken this job when she so clearly did not want it, they had already departed the cane’s thick canopy. Together, they stopped on the red road, their eyes widening.

Horace Jacobs’s estate rose against the night sky, a bright blot blurring the horizon.

The ivory resort towered over them and the rest of the island from atop its hill. Light streamed from a veranda full of large French windows flanked by matching shutters, ornate railings, and massive white pillars. A wooden bridge arched over the wide loch in front of the house, leading to a floating gazebo. The loch’s breeze spun around them, heavy with the scent of ripe fruit. Hedges of low-hanging ti leaf fronds dipped into the pond’s hazy surface, which reflected the house’s lights like fireflies in the night.

Lehua had never seen a place so grand except in movies. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, summoning the stories her grandparents would tell of old Hawaiʻi, green and lush—so unlike Phoenix, with its red rock borders and resilient desert life. She remembered little of those interred stories except for the spark of connection she’d felt as her grandparents had told them. Their passing had pruned her and Ohia from that connection, unmooring them from any real past or home.

That same unmoored feeling grew stronger the closer Lehua got to the grand house and its fairy-tale loch. The fantasy felt tentative. Fragile. One wrong step and the house would disappear like some verdant vision.

The two girls approached the resort’s covered entrance, trading red dirt for gravel. The tall entryway was flanked by columns and patterned with thin shadows like cobwebs. Beneath the long archway, a woman stood so still, Lehua almost mistook her for a statue.

She was pale like marble, wearing a floral white aloha shirt that was near luminescent in the dark. Her black hair was pulled into a low chignon and a small smile toyed with the corner of her mouth.

“Melia, good evening. My, you’re even prettier in person. I’m Chiyo Amaya, Kōpaʻa’s manager,” she greeted in a soft lilt. A braid of variegated green wreathed the manager’s arms, matching the leaves Lehua and Melia had passed on their way to the resort. A ti leaf lei. She draped the adornment over Melia’s shoulders. “Welcome.”

Chiyo could be any age south of forty. Her dewy skin flushed a delicate pink near her cheekbones. Her crescent eyes flickered between the two girls before stopping decidedly on Lehua with a flash of familiarity, then confusion at Lehua’s shorn hair and tattoos. Like she was a puzzle she couldn’t work out, the funhouse version of another girl—her twin, Ohia.

Except that wasn’t the name Chiyo said.

“Alana?”

That Which Feeds Us,by Keala Kendall will be released on May 5, 2026 from Penguin Random House Books for Young Readers. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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