A poignant and promising first novel.
Nonfiction author McManus (The Hawaiian House Now, 2007) offers a late-19th-century drama set during the Hawaiian royal family’s fall from power.
In 1891, Eliza Dawson, the haole (Caucasian) daughter of a wealthy sugar plantation owner in Honolulu, and Ben Ahsang, the son of a prominent Chinese merchant who originally amassed his fortune in the legal opium trade, are in love. When the Hawaiian king, Kalakaua, dies, Ben’s father foresees a compromised future for Hawaiians of Chinese heritage. He sends Ben to China, where an arranged marriage awaits him. Soon after, the heartbroken 17-year-old Eliza discovers that she’s pregnant with Ben’s child. Because she insists on keeping the baby, her father bribes Abram Malveaux to marry her. Abram is a fearsome man who manages a ranch on the isolated island of Molokai, where Eliza goes on to endure treachery and tragedy. When she eventually escapes back to Oahu, she finds the island on the brink of revolution. The queen is under house arrest, and the haole landowners, descendants of the Christian missionaries, are about to succeed in a plan involving the American annexation of Hawaii. Eliza’s father sides with the Hawaiian rebels, and she becomes his secret emissary to the queen. Although Eliza’s story occasionally skirts the edge of melodrama, it nevertheless serves as an engaging vehicle for a vivid history lesson and an intimate portrait of a Hawaii on the precipice of change. McManus skillfully weaves in descriptions of Honolulu’s beauty and floral scents, the anguish of Molokai’s leper colony, and the vast intermingling of cultures on the islands (for example, Ben’s father is Chinese, his mother’s English and Hawaiian). Eliza’s narration uses intermittent, unspoken thoughts, diary entries, and unmailed letters to her best friend, the Crown Princess Ka’iulani, to move the story back and forth in time, recalling past, carefree days and exposing her present, deep sadness. A large cast of well-drawn characters, including some vile villains, adds interest and momentum.
A poignant and promising first novel.Pub Date: June 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5432-3210-3
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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