Booklife Review

Illuminating a Honolulu more rich, complex, and human than most tourists see between hotels and ABC Stores, this urgent collection both abridges and expands 2008’s original, colossal Honolulu Stories. These 29 fictions capturing a city and cultures facing relentless change, from the diving fisherman in Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada’s “All My Relations,” who feels more kinship with sharks than the “idiot bone-sacks” who “have killed so much reef and habitat with your sunscreen and your dumping,” to the young people vandalizing condo construction sites in Jeffrey J. Higa’s “Us Guys and the Devil” and the “Hi‘ilawe”-singing musicians in J. Freen’s “Frank’s Place,” a band whose young uke player favors the “modern, plugged-in, rip-it-up style.”

Selected with an eye for everyday texture and the striking detail, these bracing fictions from the last 40 years move and jolt, revealing the lives of the city’s many communities, from those who have come to feel that “Nevah befo’ was Hawaiians pushed back in da sea,” to new arrivals, like the migrant sex workers in a stunning excerpt (“‘This is Hawai‘i? Looks like another America Town to me’”) from Nora Okja Keller’s novel Fox Girl, or the haole karaoke enthusiast in Mark Panek’s “An Island in Waikiki” who tries to fit in at the localest of local bars. The editors make a powerful case not just for Honolulu’s local literature but for its pidgin language, with several standout stories, like Darrell Lum’s “The Moiliili Bag Man,” told entirely in dialect.

“Despite the happy-go-lucky image of Hawaiians,” the narrator of Mindy Eun Soo Pennybacker’s “Obedient Son” notes, “their songs are so full of separation and longing it can break your heart.” That story and many others here—including tales of serving in Iraq and Vietnam, working as housekeepers and strip-club bouncers, and striving to keep connections to the past alive—also sound deep notes of loss and yearning. A beautiful, clear-eyed, sometimes pained collection, bursting with revelations.

Takeaway: Powerhouse stories revealing Honolulu life, literature, and language.

Comparable Titles: Chris Mckinney’s Honolulu Noir, Lee A. Tonouchi’s CHIBURU: Anthology of Hawaiʻi Okinawan Literature.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A