Review by Booklist Review
All things weird, wonderful, mysterious, and mythical collide in this excellent debut story collection. Focused on mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women and ensconced in Hawaiian history and lore, starting with "A Catalogue of Kānaka Superstitions, as Told by Your Mother," each story explores what it means to be a woman, but especially a woman of color. In one, a writer is pushed to write from her Hawaiian point of view, chooses to write about the Night Marchers (fabled and deadly ghosts in Hawaiian lore) despite her grandmother's warnings, and then finds her manuscript pages vibrating and hears the beat of the Marchers. In the title story, a woman accidentally defies a superstition ("don't drive over the Pali with pork in your car") and then begins to suffer debilitating periods, has a traumatic pregnancy, and gives birth to what she believes to be a boar. Many of the stories contain such bits of the supernatural. In "The Love and Decline of the Corpse Flower," a recently widowed woman sees her deceased wife growing out of a gifted corpse flower. This great book signals the arrival of a very talented writer. Recommend for fans of Helen Oyeyemi's oddity.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kakimoto interweaves themes of sexual desire and fertility with Hawaiian mythology in her unflinching debut collection. In the title story, 12-year-old Sadie transports pork leftovers from a party via the Pali Highway, risking the wrath of Kamapua'a, the Hawaiian fire goddess Pele's ex-lover, who is half man, half pig and curses anyone bringing pork over the old Pali road. Sadie's transgression may have incurred a lifetime of bad luck, beginning when her family's car hits a wild boar. Years later, the injured pig mysteriously replaces Sadie's baby in the child's bassinet. "Hotel Molokai" recalls the time the 13-year-old narrator's grandmother brought her to visit family on the island and make a pilgrimage to a sacred rock imbued with powerful fertility magic. Thinking of her abused cousin, a teenage boy, the narrator wonders why her family should want more children when they don't take good care of the ones they have. In "Ms. Amelia's Salon for Women in Charge," working-poor Kehaulani, whose banker boyfriend likes her to get her genitals waxed, goes to a new salon where she must choose a personality trait to give up in exchange for her waxing. Marked by a wry sense of humor and an unerring touch for the surreal, Kakimoto's stories add up to a powerful exploration of gender, class, race, colonialism, and domestic violence. This eloquent outing marks Kakimoto as a writer to watch. Agent: Iwalani Kim, Sanford J. Greenburger Assoc. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Hawai'i, girls and women fight to find their identities amid conflicting cultures in stories touched with magical realism. The female protagonists of these stories range in age from preteen to 70, and all are of Hawaiian or mixed heritage. They struggle with gender issues and motherhood, with food and body image, and they find it difficult to bridge the demands of multiple cultures, to reconcile the traditions of Hawai'i with the chaos of modern America. Often, traditional legends of ancestral warriors and mythical creatures spring to life amid the everyday. In the title story, 12-year-old Sadie is grappling with the onset of her first period and her family's insistence that she learn about precolonial Hawai'i: "She learns too much about her culture, things she wishes to unknow." Is the ban on carrying pork with you (even leftovers in Tupperware) as you travel a certain road just a superstition or a real curse, one that manifests years later in a nightmarish pregnancy? In "Story of Men," the frazzled mother of six kids buys a used clothes dryer and finds inside it a Menehune, a magical being that might be something like a cuddly elf or might be a primeval avenger. Whatever it is, this one takes over the household, with surprising results. In "Temporary Dwellers," a teen narrates a story that takes place in a world where the island of Kaua'i is being bombed for military training. A refugee from the bombings, an angry girl about her age, moves in with the narrator and her mother on another island. Both the newcomer and the situation in Kaua'i are wreathed in mystery, and the narrator becomes obsessed. "Ms. Amelia's Salon for Women in Charge" is a surreal take on cultural notions of female beauty in which a Hawaiian woman with a blond haole boyfriend visits a place where having her pubic hair waxed is paid for with an ominous "trait exchange." In "Aiko, the Writer," the title character, whose manuscript for a book about the legendary Night Marchers is doing things manuscripts don't usually do, is advised by her dead grandmother, in the form of a gecko: "There are ways to tell Hawaiian stories and ways to make Hawaiian stories vulnerable to the white hand. You'll need to be extremely careful with your choices." Those choices animate these absorbing stories. Magical events illuminate the all-too-real problems of Hawaiian women in an impressive story collection. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
