by Lisa Linn Kanae
Islands Linked by Ocean is more than a collection of Hawai‘i-based short stories: It’s the verbal equivalent of a heavy, glossy coffee table book full of in-the-moment images imbued with a unique elegance and wonder by the artist who captured them. Lisa Linn Kanae conjures frame after frame, many familiar to most of us, but in a light that brings out a grace we never knew existed: a veteran steersman berating his novice stroker, the banter and gossip of women in an office breakroom, a starving dog tied to a chain-link fence behind a dumpster. My own favorite is the title story which ironically contains the least amount of fiction maybe because I, too, had a McKinley-alum dad who could croon like Dean Martin. And I never realized how beautifully he did so until I read Kanae’s work about her own father.
What to Read This February: 5 Hawai‘i Book Picks Recommended by Local Experts
We reached out to our friends at Da Shop: Books + Curiosities to ask their community of writers and readers for their picks: a Newbery-winning Korean folk tale, a memoir, a murder case and more.
February 2, 2021
by Juliet S. Kono
Anshu is a singular achievement, a novel that captures better than most the unique suffering of a people, a place and a time through the experience of a single character. Himiko Aoki’s life is a study of woe, from her humble Big Island beginnings and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy that leads to challenges in Japan, culminating in her joining the ranks of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Throughout her trials, you will suffer along with Himiko, but gradually, almost imperceptibly, you will eventually find peace with her at the peak of her misfortune at the end of a quintessentially Buddhist journey. Juliet S. Kono has given me in