Lucky for local readers, these three newly published, Hawaii-related books offer escape and essential company in this societal timeout.
“Miss Aluminum”
Susanna Moore
Farra, Straus and Giroux, $27
Susanna Moore put contemporary Hawaii on the literary map with her haunting, lyrical debut novel “My Old Sweetheart” in the early 1980s, followed by six more novels, a girlhood memoir and a history of the islands.
“Miss Aluminum,” her frank, funny, sometimes harrowing new memoir, begins with the Punahou graduate leaving Honolulu, ridden with guilt at having lost her late mother’s ring — likely stolen while left with beach services during her surf lesson at a Waikiki hotel, but she blames herself.
Moore recounts her adventures as a reporter in Philadelphia, a salesperson at Bergdorf Goodman in New York, modeling (including as Miss Aluminum, with a metal trident and fish tail) in New York and Chicago and as a bit actress in Hollywood, where she hung out with stars such as Warren Beatty and became lifelong friends with writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.
Along the way, she also suffered rape and domestic violence.
Toward the end, the narrative returns to her Hawaiian childhood and the mysterious loss of her mother, a place and theme central to many of her books.
“One day in the spring of 1957, when I was eleven years old, my mother disappeared,” she writes in “Miss Aluminum.”
Her father tells the children “our mother had not been feeling well, and had been taken to a very nice place where she would soon be made whole again, which caused my younger brother to think that she had been taken apart at the arms and legs and thrown into the ocean.”
Later, he calls Moore into his study and sternly reveals that someone has gouged her name into an antique koa desk that “was said to have belonged to the high chiefess Princess Ruth (Keelikolani).”
Moore truthfully says she didn’t do it, but when the trusted family gardener molests her, one can guess who did.
Instead of being crushed by all these traumas, Moore chooses to become a mother and a writer.
“Miss Aluminum” is a work of rare heart and courage, one of Moore’s best yet.
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“Sharks in the Time of Saviors”
Kawai Strong Washburn
Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $27
Waipio Valley on Hawaii island is the piko (navel) of this literary first novel by Kawai Washburn, a native of the Big Island like his characters in a Filipino-Hawaiian family.
After Nainoa (Noa) Flores, the visionary middle child, falls off a boat and is returned alive to his mother by sharks, he comes to be viewed as a savior, “the one,” as his brother Dean calls him, not without resentment.
When the Honokaa sugar plantation closes, the family loses their income and moves to Kalihi, Oahu, where the empathic Noa becomes known as a healer and helps support the family; despite their economic and emotional stress, the siblings go to mainland colleges on scholarships and sister Kaui becomes a professor.
Noa becomes a doctor in Portland, Ore., but, burdened by his self-imposed duty to save the Hawaiian people as well as his patients, he breaks down and tells his mother, “I don’t want to do it anymore.”
What too often feel like tropes in Hawaiian debut novels — Night Marchers, aumakua animal-spirit guardians — are limned with fresh mystery and power through Washburn’s characters’ eyes.
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“Wave Woman: The Life and Struggles of a Surfing Pioneer”
Vicky Heldreich Durand
Self-published, $29.95
In one of many lovely surfing scenes in Vicky Heldreich Durand’s debut memoir, she and her mother share an overhead Makaha wave.
“Several times throughout the ride we both slowed down, stalling before turning and cutting back toward the breaking wave, shooting down the wall of water closer to the curl. … It was an experience of elemental connecting with the waves, with the ocean, and with each other.”
Durand, then 16, realized she had always missed her mother, who worked full time, and regained her at last in the surf.
Her mother, Betty Pembroke Heldreich Winstedt, 40, fell in love with the waves at Waikiki on her first visit to Hawaii, in 1952, when she and her daughters took a lesson from a handsome beach-boy at the Royal Hawaiian hotel.
She talked her husband into moving from California and bought a beachfront lot at Makaha, where she became a big-wave surfer.
She placed second in the first Makaha surf contest, in 1954, won the world surfing championship in Peru in 1956 and lived in her house by the sea until she died at age 98.
With a foreword by surfing great Peter Cole and many photos, “Wave Woman” is also a winning portrait of a simpler, less crowded Hawaiian place and time.
Durand’s spare, understated, yet rich memoir is a must-read.
For more, go to wavewomanbook.com.
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