2023 Was Hawai‘i’s Breakout Book Year

It was a long time coming, this moment.

Fact is, there’s never been a year remotely like it for Hawai‘i, in terms of books. Local authors published by mainstream houses or a big indie gave us four strong novels, a shockingly good story collection, and an acute Hawaiian diaspora memoir. 

Previously, a good year was a book by Susanna Moore, Kiana Davenport or Lois-Ann Yamanaka—and there were many years without any. Novels by Davenport and Yamanaka made 2006 a good year, followed by Kaui Hart Hemmings’ 2007 novel The Descendants—which, however, didn’t really take off until the 2011 movie by Alexander Payne. 

Kristiana Kahakauwila’s This is Paradise (2013) took up a torch from the previous generations in terms of its high literary ambitions—fulfilled—and diaspora subject matter. But then it was slow lava until Kaui Strong Washburn (2020) and Joseph Han (2022) landed their novels. So perhaps it was this three who lit a fire under New York gatekeeper agents and editors. There was also steady momentum provided by #MeToo, #BLM, #PublishingPaidMe, #OscarSoWhite, and the success of Crazy Rich Asians, Disney’s Moana, and the glorious Everything Everywhere at Once.

What National Does

Does it really matter if a book is published nationally vs. locally? Yes. Not to slight our dogged and powerful local literary production, but Hawaii is in a perpetual struggle for mindshare, shorthand for how others think of us and perceive us. To dispel the umbrella-drink-sand-sun-surf stereotype, sales size matters—media outreach matters—because impact matters. 

The truth is that Hawai‘i is a thin market. We lack bookstores, distributor networks, book review outlets, and reviewers. (A big reason we started THROB.) Frankly, we lack voracious readers of the kind we’ve seen transform the literary marketplace ever since Harry Potter and Oprah made reading feel essential, soul-sustaining, communitarian. In the aggregate we just don’t read a lot (except our social media feeds). As a consequence, we’re a book market the size of Nebraska, a state with a third of our population.

There are real reasons and good excuses for this state of affairs, but every time a Hawai‘i-themed book comes up for consideration major publishers do the math on us and say, Why bother?

In a vicious circle, the lack of national exposure and apathy saps our local talent. I’ve had several established writers confess they’d all but given up after the letdown that comes from putting years into a book only to sell a few hundred copies. For locally published adult literary fiction, the tip-top Hawai‘i ceiling—with one or two exceptions—is a couple thousand. That’s a lot of aunties buying 20 to give for presents. Local publishers are slow to reprint, if at all. Your first print run could be your last.

#HawaiiZipPakBooks

Starting in January 2023, however, a new title popped every month or two. The names on the spine: Little A, Knopf, Soho, Bloomsbury, HarperVia, Soho. Breakthrough, anomaly, warp in the matrix, roll of the dice, whatever you call it—#HawaiiZipPakBooks—here they are, in order of appearance:

Local, a memoir by Jessica Machado (Little A, Amazon’s literary imprint): a Nineties Kanaka Makakilo girl’s story of piecing together a self and future from her fragmented and uncommunicative family, whose failures to connect feel familiar—a result of dispossession and the internal diaspora of hard lives. Remarkable insights delivered in crisp, gem-like scenes.

The Lost Wife, a novel by Susanna Moore (Knopf): an outcast girl in 1850s New England struggles to escape exploitative employers, a grim asylum for the poor and insane, and a violent husband by heading West, where she marries an Indian Affairs agent who’s dispatched to run a remote outpost. There she finds herself drawn to the company of the native women and, after an uprising, their willing captive and eventual witness to the tragedy. A driving pace and deadpan wit reminiscent of Charles Portis make this fact-based story irresistible, and memorable.

Eventide, Water City, volume 2 in a sci-fi noir trilogy by Chris McKinney (Soho Press): as our review said, “If Book One, Midnight, gives us a world at peace, unified and whipped into a bland human humus, Book Two, Eventide, gives us the world eight years after everything broke,” thanks to McKinney’s ancient detective anti-hero’s finding out the world’s savior, Akira Kimura, faked the crisis that led to her godlike adoration. That she was the detective’s boss during that time makes him complicit, but at first he’s still allied with her against her murderous, lizard-tailed, genetically enhanced daughter Ascalon. 

Much weirdness ensues, but it’s oddly familiar. Half of the action takes place in The Great Leachate, a.k.a. the Midwest, now a dumping ground for everything toxic, including the metastasized MAGA mutants who live there, speak in advertising slogans, and celebrate everything crass and ugly about humanity. “McKinney’s vision of this spaghetti Western/Westworld/Mad Max destruction derby is a singularly demented comic riff. It’s also on point.”

Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, a debut story collection by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto (Bloomsbury): as THROB’s Angela Nishimoto wrote in her review, “A riveting collection of 11 short stories written in poetically-infused prose, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s Every Drop is a Man’s Nightmare is a groundbreaking work. Feminist in slant, the book portrays shadowy aspects of the distaff side. It pays tribute to giants who came before and points a way forward to the future of writing fiction placed in Hawai‘i. After reading a preview, Chris McKinney, a well-known local author, declared, “This book is a monster.”

My review in Honolulu Magazine said, “The characters in Every Drop do feel lived. They work unglamorous, even humiliating jobs, yet their stories crackle with surprises. But to get them right, [Kakimoto] had to work through her Native Hawaiian ancestry. At first, ‘the pressure to write it right, to do justice to it, completely silenced all my interest in writing about Hawai‘i,’ she says. ‘I was really scared about getting it wrong. But I had a slow realization and began to challenge all these ideas of a monolithic Hawaiian cultural experience. They’re just not true.’” The honesty and artistry of the resulting work has delivered a salutary shock to literary Hawai‘i, and the world.

Hula, a novel by Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes (HarperVia): Synchronicity is real, as author Hakes takes up where Kakimoto leaves off, asking in this story of a haole-looking girl raised Hawaiian in Hilo by the daughter of its foremost kumu hula: Who’s Hawaiian? How much is blood and how much is culture? What does skin color have to do with it? Set in the years leading up to the founding of the Merrie Monarch Festival and the large-scale protests that followed homelands being annexed by the state for strip malls and airport expansion, the story surprises by segueing into a biography of protest and culture resurrection. What is new and at times stark is the way Hakes skillfully employs her characters to highlight the poisonous racial dynamics created, no doubt intentionally, by the 50% blood quantum rule established in 1922 by the U.S. Department of the Interior for Hawaiian Homestead eligibility. This is a big novel by a clear-eyed writer of talent and courage.

Sunset, Water City, third and final volume in the trilogy by Chris McKinney (Soho Press): as our review said, “if you are lucky enough to escape Akira Kimura’s great rapture that disappeared 99% of the planet’s population [in Book Two], you become an ant-like class of cyborg serfs, Gardeners, devoted to repairing environmental damage, erasing mankind’s cities, and doing what Kimura commands via OneVoice. And what does Kimura want? To spray the universe with voracious little eyeball-sized Kimura clones, space invaders who colonize everything they encounter. Like Pac-Man, basically… 

“The Water City Trilogy is our invitation to slow down and just think. Do we want more years, more lives? What happens to birthrate, then? Do we want to colonize the galaxies if we’re reduced to germs of greed and ego? Is AI the enemy of the species, or is it those who have gained access to our psyches using irresistible algorithms and conveniently implanted technological enhancements?” It’s a visionary work grounded in today’s science and tomorrow’s folly.

Local Heroes

So there they are, 2023’s breakthrough books. What’s collectively thrilling is the solid literary accomplishment each of the books represents in language, voice, subject matter, authorial chops, and courage. Full credit goes to them, our authors. These are books that don’t mince words, back down, or coast on popular political formulas. They dive deep and share with us their unflinching gaze at what they find under the surface of our lives here. They risk making us uncomfortable while ravishing us with their imaginations.

While of course they’ve had support from our local writing community (and diaspora networks), from our shared histories, and from the example set by their forerunners’ commitment to telling our stories our way(s), they did not shy away from blazing their own trails, too.

Go Forth and Multiply

It’s a tricky question that every Hawai‘i writer now may secretly want to ask: What does this mean for us?

The truth is we don’t know. But from what we do know many will not like the answer. First, if the above books don’t sell in respectable numbers, enthusiasm may wane. Particularly if the pipeline is already stuffed with books to come in the next couple of years—something I don’t know the answer to—we may find ourselves in a suddenly oversaturated market. The books may not be as good (statistically a likely possibility), or make such a splash (because no longer a novelty). Even if they are, they could underperform. And that could erode the reception of future books and new authors.

But, the beach-glass ceiling has been broken. It’s clear Hawai‘i will not recede again into the shadowy land that my wife and I found, coming to New York in 1982 to meet agents and editors, where there is only One Book and One Book Only: “Michener wrote Hawai‘i.”    

All we writers have to do is write to the standard of the ZipPakSix, only better. There’s already a new entrant coming in February 2024: Zoe Eisenberg’s novel Significant Others, from HarperCollins imprint MIRA. I’ve just cracked it open and can report Eisenberg’s a fine writer with a deft touch—and when it comes to moving the story along, she doesn’t mess around. 

As for all of us readers, if you haven’t done so already, go out now and buy books. Buy them all. Use those gift cards, fill a shelf. We need good numbers to keep the pipeline open. Let’s show the world that Hawaii can be known for more than sun and surf, volcanoes and quarterbacks. 

So that at least we can beat Nebraska.

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Image by Laura Kapfer.