I can sum it up very quickly: This is a great book.
I am always impressed when a male writer tells a story from a female point of view and makes it work. In "Honolulu", Alan Brennart has done his considerable research proud, and woven a fictional story in with historical events to create a seamless, very readable tale of a Korean woman of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and her many family connections, both by blood and friendship.
Jin is a dutiful child of an upper-middle-class Korean family in a small city, who enters the world as an unwanted daughter named "Regret" (because she wasn't a son). Bright and inquisitive by nature, she longs to go to school like her brothers, but to do so would bring shame on her family. By subterfuge and her sympathizing aunt's aid, she finds someone who teaches her how to read; but when her father learns of it, the result is not what Jin had hoped for. She languishes, frustrated, within the confines of her family's home, with only a young sister-in-law-in-training for company.
Her bid to break free comes when she learns of the "picture brides", essentially mail-order brides for Korean men in Hawaii. She overcomes her family's strenuous objections to her desire to become a "picture bride", and embarks upon her greatest adventure, in the company of four other Korean girls.
This is a book that was difficult to put down, as I travelled with Jin through the Hawaii of early non-Hawaiian occupation. The governing of the Hawaiian nation had been connived away from the Hawaiian royal family not many years before; the power was in the hands of a handful of white overlords and the sugar- and pineapple-companies, the labour provided by immigrant, primarily Asian, laborers. Interwoven with the great story of Jin, and her personal struggle for betterment, Mr Brennert has delivered a history of Hawaii I never knew before, and shown it warts and all. Far from being the paradise it was rumored to be, it leaned heavily on the class system, the haves and the have-nots. The houses the laborers lived in, both on the plantations and the tenements in the towns, are shown in all the squalor the unfortunate "picture brides" had to deal with. And it also shows people determined to make their lives better, in the face of great adversity.
The chick-lit device of our "picture brides" - now four in number - eventually creating a partnership, when they have all reunited later in the book, is more than a device; it is, apparently, a recognized association of the time. The author is not only well versed in Hawaii and Hawaiian history, but in a good deal of the Asian cultures who made up the greater part of Hawaiian immigrants. I felt a lot more informed when I finished reading it.
And finishing reading it was the hard part. As I told a friend, it was a book that didn't go fast enough (makes you want to read ahead to find out what happens, but don't do it) while being a book I did not want to end. I was consumed by the story from the first pages, and kept it with me most of the time to snatch a few more minutes as I could. A great story, well told, with great characters and great history. Very recommended.
