This Is Paradise: Stories
For visitors from Oklahoma to Okinawa, the Hawaiian Islands are paradise, even if only for a little while. But for natives and locals, surrounded by tourists, tormented by a heritage they can no longer maintain, life on these lava rocks is anything but perfect. Maui’s up-country is home to a family of cock fighters whose legacy is left in the hands of a young woman with a devious plot to avenge her father’s murder, one that will compromise her very identity. Honolulu’s luxury hotels lure a young mainland woman whose innocent acceptance of vacation-brochure hype leads directly to her death. And on the Big Island, a gay man sits by his father’s deathbed, tortured by his desire to reveal his sexual identity before his parent dies. Cogent explorations of regret, remorse, ambition, and ambivalence can take place anywhere on earth, but in a land known for its beguiling enchantment, such fatalism takes on a forbidding, even sinister, mien as Kahakauwila deconstructs the aloha myth. --Carol Haggas