EXTINCTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Ten stories set mostly in contemporary Hawaii feature troubled family relationships and the hope of repair.

Rigg’s debut begins in “Target Island” with the detonation in 1948 of a 2,000-pound bomb on Kaho‘olawe. The shock hits a family living across the channel in Maui: a mother thrown against a stove, a father knocked unconscious, and a baby, Harrison, somehow escaping injury from the shattered glass in his crib. For Harrison, the aftershock becomes his life’s work as he strives to reclaim and clear Kaho‘olawe of bombs, ultimately for his granddaughter, whom he hopes “will bring her own children to this place, will point at the bomb-free earth and say, ‘Your great-grandpa did this.’” Throughout the collection, this hopefulness runs alongside the characters’ sorrow over estranged or failed relationships and the despoiled ecosystems of Hawaii. Characters recur, sometimes as the parent or child of another character, sometimes peripherally, and often unnamed, and the resolution of one story turns out to be provisional in light of events in another. The turbulent mother-and-daughter relationship portrayed in “(Partheno)genesis,” for example, is surprising given the father’s perspective in an earlier tale, and the breakup that devastates a main character of the title story is triggered by the offstage reunion of two characters who had been separated at the conclusion of another story. Among the standouts are the last two entries. In “Poachers,” a young woman worries about an unexpected pregnancy given that her own mother’s love is “a feeling so fragile that she sometimes, in its absence, wondered if it existed”; while helping her boyfriend’s mother poach flowers for sale, she finds another source of love for herself and the child she may have. In the title story, this child, now grown, and her father attempt to reconcile from a falling out with the help of unnamed spirits. These spirits proclaim that stories do not end, an insight that this collection, refracted through different perspectives over many generations, skillfully illuminates.

This debut collection brilliantly and hopefully contests the finality of any story.