Book Reviews
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Book Reviews |
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Mahu, in the Hawai’ian
language, refers to a gay man. It may or may not originally have
been derogatory -- in traditional Hawai’ian culture, "gay" men lived
among women and did "women’s work," while it was not uncommon for
"straight" men to have special friendships with other men that
included sexual contact -- but, as with the Hawai’ian word for
Caucasians, "haole," it has come to possess a negative
connotation. For Detective Kimo Kanapa’aka of the Honolulu police force, the idea of being known as a "maku" is terrifying -- enough so that he squashes his authentic sexuality under a barrage of meaningless sexual trysts with "wahine" (women) of every stripe, often tourists he won’t have to string along or make excuses to in order to get rid of. But finally, after a hard day’s work on the street followed by a late night of drinking, Kimo decides to check out a local gay bar -- and inadvertently witnesses a dead body being dumped in an alley behind the bar as he flees the attention of a too-eager patron. Since Kimo is one of only a few homicide detectives in the precinct, it’s not a great surprise that he and his partner, the homophobic Akoni, draw the duty of looking into the victim’s death. But Kimo has more information at hand than he can readily account for -- and the fear that his carefully hidden secret is about to explode into the open, possibly derailing his career and damaging his standing with friends and family. |
| It’s an outing
that Kimo cannot prevent, and when it happens, it throws his entire
world into chaos, turning him into an overnight celebrity in the
media and persona non grata at the Department. At the same time,
Kimo finds the shackles falling away from his true sexuality --
helped along by a handsome lawyer he meets at the beach -- and
before he can felp himself, he’s feeling his way through the
uncharted terrain of sexual freedom even as he delves deep, and
without authorization, into the murder case and its wild collection
of clues, deceptions, and hunky gay suspects. This is a dynamite read, tackling the double pronged challenge of a well-plotted mystery and the complex social issues of being gay in an island culture with two-fisted energy. Plakcy evokes Hawai’i in all its paradisiacal, paradoxical colors, reminding us at one point that, "Until 1962, it was actually illegal to give a kid a Hawai’ian first name," folding ethnic tensions and multi-ethnic family trees into his mix, and retreating often into the tranquil world of surfing. From time to time, his prose shows the need for a closer editorial eye -- but so what? He paints the sun and sea so lovingly that you can hear the lapping of the waves call you deeper into the life of his first-person narrator page by page. |
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Publisher: The Haworth Positronic Press.
Publication Date: July 1, 2005. Pages: 282. Price: $22.95. ISBN-13:
978-1-56023-533-0 Kilian Melloy reviews
media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, as
well as for wigglefish.com, where he serves as Editor at
Large. |
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