While it sometimes lacks tension, this terrorism tale expertly draws on portions of Hawaii’s history.
A historical novel focuses on murder and turmoil in 1920s Hawaii.
Grant Kingsley is the son of a sugar plantation owner in Honolulu. At the outset of the narrative, Grant; his brother, David; and their father, James, are set to meet with the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association. It is 1924, and labor relations in the sugar industry are not exactly amicable. A recent strike ended with deadly force, and things show few signs of improving. The planters insist they need to keep wages low for their product to compete on the international market, but the laborers demand better wages. The HSPA feels that the Kingsleys are too soft on their workers. Before discussions can progress, the unthinkable happens: An explosion occurs and James is killed. Who would perpetrate such an act? The HSPA believes that some disgruntled Japanese workers are to blame (“Japanese dynamiters are the culprits,” one man insists), but Grant feels otherwise. Grant, an attorney, decides to investigate. He helps his detective friend Chang Asing track down the killer. Many different ethnic groups—native Hawaiians, the Japanese, and Filipinos—have a reason to be upset with the HSPA, but would any of them resort to murder? It turns out the assassin is a communist named Miguel from the Philippines who has received KGB training. Will Grant and Asing be able to pick through all the thorny relations in Hawaii to stop Miguel before he strikes again? The main problem with Fernandez’s (Splintered Paddle, 2019, etc.) novel is that there is not much to unravel about who murdered James. Sure, Grant and the other characters do not know the killer or why he would resort to such means, yet readers do. Likewise, Miguel’s motivations are clear from the outset. As Grant and Asing collect clues, there is not as much tension as one might anticipate from a plot based on catching an assassin. The book’s excitement stems instead from the many facets of Hawaii’s past that play, in some way or another, into the bigger story. Many readers may not know much about the uneasy melting pot that was Hawaii at the time, and so, for those unfamiliar with, say, the 5-5-3 Treaty of 1922, there is certainly much to learn. From Hawaii’s past as a place ruled by royalty to the many ways the wealthy sugar planters attempted to manipulate their workers, the historical tidbits are weaved into the tale in entertaining ways. Even the history of the ukulele (which Asing plays well) makes an appearance in the narrative. Then there is the complex story of Miguel. How exactly does one become a devout, murderous communist in early-20th-century Philippines? Miguel may not be the most sophisticated villain (for instance, he declares matter-of-factly: “I cannot wait forever to have my vengeance against the killers of Filipinos”) yet his presence helps shed light on international relations at the time. After all, if a communist revolution could happen in a place as vast as Russia, who could stop it in a collection of islands like Hawaii, especially with so much conflict between classes?
While it sometimes lacks tension, this terrorism tale expertly draws on portions of Hawaii’s history.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9990326-8-8
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Makani Kai Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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