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.
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