Rani Patel In Full Effect

From the publisher:

Almost seventeen, Rani Patel appears to be a kick-ass Indian girl breaking cultural norms as a hip-hop performer in full effect. But in truth, she's a nerdy flat-chested nobody who lives with her Gujarati immigrant parents on the remote Hawaiian island of Moloka'i, isolated from her high school peers by the unsettling norms of Indian culture where "husband is God." Her parents' traditionally arranged marriage is a sham. Her dad turns to her for all his needs—even the intimate ones. When Rani catches him two-timing with a woman barely older than herself, she feels like a widow and, like widows in India are often made to do, she shaves off her hair. Her sexy bald head and hard-driving rhyming skills attract the attention of Mark, the hot older customer who frequents her parents' store and is closer in age to her dad than to her. Mark makes the moves on her and Rani goes with it. He leads Rani into 4eva Flowin', an underground hip hop crew—and into other things she's never done. Rani ignores the red flags. Her naive choices look like they will undo her but ultimately give her the chance to discover her strengths and restore the things she thought she'd lost, including her mother.

My thoughts:

This book has garnered a lot of (choke) National awards, but I am hesitant to put this down as local-Hawaii-literature. Still, it does take place on Molokaʻi in the 90s and although I first felt like the geographic markers in the story were sort of like people in Hawaiʻi watching Dog, the Bounty Hunter, I know that even though I would never drive so much on Molokaʻi, one of the high school kids I talked to from Molokaʻi High said his biggest achievement was driving 200 miles in one night. Do you know how many times you have to cruise back and forth to make 200 miles? Epic. So if you do not get the Dog reference, but you are from Oahu and Hawaiʻi island, like me, you know that they are in Waiʻanae on the west side of Oʻahu and suddenly they are in Puna or Ocean View on Hawaiʻi island and people who do not know better think since they are driving the same black SUV, it is all one island when it is not. 

I think the 90's slang, even the hip hop songs are more familiar to me and I am WAY older than the YA audience so I'm not sure how they take that. Some of the slang is really dated. We don't say okole anymore but our use of Hawaiian over these 20 years has also gotten more precise. Depending on which kupuna story is heard, it is Molokai with the kai being the ocean versus Molokaʻi, but Lanaʻi is written as Lanai in the book which is inconsistent. I also don't know how readers from the continent understand the smattering of local terms like skebei (Japanese slang that even my college students don't understand. It is a plantation slang from the grandparents long gone), holoholo (Hawaiian), etc. 

What I liked was the author used her psychiatry background and family practice background to talk about difficult issues in a more realistic way and then adds some information at the end. I am interested in how the younger local readers in 2018 feel about the use of counter culture in the book, the placing of the story on Molokaʻi and the placing of the story within multiple "local" languages. It would be nice, considering this was printed in 2016 to at least get the publishers to face the ʻokina in the correct way so that it is not an apostrophe.

Celebrating Local Literature

I haven't posted in so long I needed to reassure myself that I'm still alive, but I only have a minute before I need to get back to the grindstone.

I'm running a Big Island Celebrate Reading Festival geared toward tweens and up, so once that happens on Friday, I'm all good! This festival is open to the public and it's FREE! All I ask is that the students come having read at least two of the authors on the list (I also give the schools books and my list came out in October). We're having it in the Volcanoes National Park, home of the erupting volcano, Kilauea, constantly erupting for 25 years.

I am bringing in two authors from the mainland: Neal Shusterman (Unwind, The Schwa Was Here) and Terry Trueman (Stuck in Neutral, Cruise Control), but today I wanted to celebrate the lesser known Hawaii writers that will be coming.
Patricia Wood (she's not lesser known, just that she lives in Hawaii): Lottery

From Amazon:  The action centers on how winning a $12-million lottery jackpot complicates the life of 32-year-old Perry L. Crandall, the dedicated employee of a marine supply store in the harbor city of Everett, Wash. With an IQ of 76, Perry emphatically proclaims that he is slow, not retarded! Wood's dichotomy of Perry's impaired cognition does present some challenges for Michael, especially as the unsuspecting protagonist recounts—but does not grasp—the devious conversations among his money-grubbing relatives.




Brandy Nalani McDougall: The Salt Wind: Ka Makani Pa'akai (poems)

From the publishers: This postcolonial collection of poetry is the first by Native Hawaiian poet, Brandy Nalani McDougall. Of the collection, Samoan novelist Albert Wendt writes: "Once in a while a collection of poetry comes along and grabs your eyes, heart, and na'au and makes you see and feel more deeply than you've done in a long, long time. For me, Brandy Nalani McDougall's collection is one of those. And I keep rereading it. Her poems have a unique and hugely inviting surface simplicity and elegance that immediately hook you into them, into their profound and complex depths of imagery, lyricism, political and historical savvy, feeling, thought and vision. These are woven together with unusual wisdom, perception, control of language, and intense aloha for her people and islands. You have to read this collection. It will lift you and make you feel you are more."


Chris McKinney - Tattoo and Mililani Mauka

  This is the story of Ken, a new inmate at Halawa Correctional Center, who in exchange for his tattoo tells his story. This is a violent story of another side of Hawaii.  “The other Hawai’i, the one tourists never get to see.”—Ian MacMillan

   Secretly, a man welds steel to a bulldozer. Later, another watches a ghost walk along his dry-walled hallways. A woman raises her teenage son in a homeless encampment where the boy has to fight to survive with the help of a strange, lonely cop.

In Mililani Mauka, the lives of two families, the Motts and the Krills, come together as they try to keep afloat in a changing Honolulu, a city with growing suburbs and homeless camps. The Motts, new home owners in one of suburban Mililani’s fastest growing enclaves, crave the American Dream while the Krills, now homeless in Wai‘anae, are nearly destroyed by it.






Robert Barclay: Hawaii Smiles and Melal

  These short stories take a light-hearted look at the idiosyncracies of different groups living in Hawaii.

 On Good Friday, 1981, Rujen Keju and his two sons come face to face with their complicated inheritance -- one that includes years of atomic testing and the continued military presence of the U.S. in the Pacific. In this highly original work of history and adventure, novelist Robert Barclay weaves together characters and stories from mythological times with those of the present-day to give readers a rare and unsparing look at life in the contemporary Pacific.










Living on an island, we are often isolated from each other, so the web presence on the ning has helped to start these conversations ahead of time, and on Friday, authors will do readings, then do two breakout sessions with the students. It's an exciting time, but I can't wait until it's over and I can go back to participating in memes and catching up on my reviews.