House of Thieves [Hardcover]

Kaui Hart Hemmings (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 2005

These unique stories of upper-class Hawaiian families reveal with unsentimental insight and straightforward prose the complex forces that bind family members together in love and hate.

Like the fierce, powerful, young characters that appear in her stories, Kaui Hart Hemmings demands our immediate attention. In this exciting debut collection of short stories, Hemmings establishes herself as one of the most original, unapologetic, and honest young voices to come out of the next batch of freshly schooled fiction writers. A member of upper-class Hawaiian society, she has set the beautiful island as a backdrop, indeed a foil, to describe the small torments and victories of growing up and finding one's place. Bold, frustrated teenagers and the adults who raise them wrestle with one another over the age-old issues of deprived freedom, misguided love, being cool, and being true, and they experience together the loneliness of feeling miserable in paradise.

Hemmings's tart, confident voice plunges us headfirst into the unfamiliar world of a Hawaii far from the tourist track, providing revealing glimpses of the island's divisive racial and class issues as well as the proud heritage of kings and warriors and the legacy of colonialists and missionaries. Her unceremonious dealing with issues like drugs, sex, and abandonment, and her entirely unselfconscious prose allow her stories to wash effortlessly over us like an ocean wave, always leaving behind an unusual shell, a curiously shaped rock--something to ponder that is fascinating and true.

A single mother's discovery of a pornographic magazine in her thirteen-year-old son's room sends her down a spiral of jealousy that ultimately guarantees her loss of him. A white man who is left by his native Hawaiian wife struggles to understand why he and his daughter, abandoned together, feel such deep resentment for each other. A boy who insists on the illusion of his happy family suddenly recognizes his father's lack of real love and comes to the understanding that certain things are severed and they can't grow again, the acknowledgment of the waste that comes from loving a place that doesn't love you back.

The stories in House of Thieves are told from varied points of view--a father, a child, a young woman, an adolescent boy, and more. Rooted in the circumstances and situations of island people, Hemmings's sharp and entertaining stories reveal the mundane cycle of small tragedies and victories that make up the lives of ordinary people everywhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A dusty, dreamy Hawaii rife with sexual frustration, loneliness and adolescent heartbreak is the setting for the nine stories of Hemmings's bold debut collection. Misery adores company in "Final Girl," in which a single mother discovers a pornographic magazine in her 13-year-old son's room and turns on him despite herself, wishing he had more of "that character-developing sadness. Instead, he's a child who sings in the car." In the title story, intrepid preteen Kora is anxious to fit into her clique of Lolitaesque teenage friends—island girls "doing bad things in pretty places"—and is frightened of losing her best friend, Wendy, when Wendy's delinquent brother, Perry, resurfaces. In "Begin with an Outline," a girl is haunted by her imprisoned father, a notorious drug dealer; in "Island Cowboys," embittered, indebted Pete covets his brother's easy prosperity and finds forbidden solace in his niece. A 16-year-old boy pines for his social-climbing nanny in "Secret Clutch," only to discover that she has taken up with his wealthy father; a teenage girl and her father's mistress develop a disturbing bond in "Location Scouts." At times Hemmings steers her troubled protagonists in predictable directions, but overall these are fresh, acerbic tales, offering a distinctive perspective on everyday life in a vacation paradise. Agent, Witherspoon Associates. (June 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Just as the individual land masses that make up the Hawaiian Islands are worlds unto themselves, so, too, are the characters Hemmings depicts in this penetrating exploration of the nature of families and the individuals who belong to them. Disappointment and isolation, frustration and regret inform each story's conflict, whether it is a father unprepared to raise his 10-year-old daughter while her mother lies in a coma, as in "The Minor Wars," or a pack of teenage girls flirting with independence in "House of Thieves." Hemmings takes her characters' cues from the composition of the islands she knows so well, their volcanic cores smoldering just beneath the surface, either forced to lie dormant or prone to violent outbursts. Set against the tropical backdrop of sun, sand, and surf, Hemmings' stories are all the more surreal for their perceptive juxtaposition of tumultuous emotions within such a seemingly benign paradise. With a dynamic and imaginative voice, Hemmings infuses her stories with keen insight, and lavishes her characters with profound empathy. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; First Edition edition (June 16, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594200483
• ISBN-13: 978-1594200489
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #368,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kaui Hart Hemmings was born and raised in Hawaii. She has degrees from Colorado College and Sarah Lawrence and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first novel, The Descendants, will be published in fourteen other countries and will be released as a film directed by Alexander Payne and starring George Clooney on November. 18 2011.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Slightly Salacious, Surely-Satisfying Shorts, March 5, 2006

By 

TMF (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: House of Thieves (Hardcover)

Kaui Hart Hemmings is a maestro of the poetic metaphor. I was thrilled to see House of Thieves after having read some of these great stories in literary magazines over the past few years. When I say she writes poetically, don't expect a drop of sentimentality. It's more in the `bon mot' sense that her prose cleverly articulates feelings and thoughts you might have assumed to be inexpressible.

These stories all take place in Hawaii, but not the Hawaii that you think you know(unless you are Hawaiian). This isn't tourists drinking Mai-Tai's or `exhaling;' it's people in their complicated lives written about intimately without affect. The author writes convincingly from the point of view of a variety of characters and each story creates its unique, entirely-human microuniverse.

Although it is almost always disingenuous to compare writers, it might still be edifying to give you a taste of what kind of ingredients you can expect to find in House of Thieves: Start with a dose of Russell Banks (circa Rule of the Bone), add an acerbic dash of Salinger, a touch of seductive glamour ala Fitzgerald, and perhaps a sardonic hint of pre-fall Winona Ryder in "Heathers."

After all the high-(and low-)fallutin' associations, I should just cut to the chase. This stuff is real. It pulls you in. Also, it made me laugh... a lot.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lost in Hawaii, March 1, 2006

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: House of Thieves (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because I went to college with a lot of middle to upper-middle class Hawaiians, and found their background kind of interesting. The nine short stories in this debut collection tend to revolve around the uneasy interactions of teenagers and adults, and the fragile emotional negotiations involved on each side. Hemmings was raised in the upper-middle class Hawaii portrayed in most of the stories, and though she studiously avoids taking an anthropological view toward the setting and its inhabitants, they stories can't help but provide a sense of some of the identity complexities of the mixed culture. It's too her credit though, that while the Hawaiian setting adds an element of interest (I probably wouldn't have picked the book up had it been set in Ohio), the stories could easily be relocated without any thematic discord.

Loneliness, loss, and frustration, are three major threads established in the opening story, "The Minor Wars", in which a father and ten-year-old daughter struggle to coexist while their wife/mother lies in a coma. In the next story, "Final Girl", it's a mother and her thirteen-year-old son who are stuck together, long abandoned by their lover/father. It's a rather acerbic story, as the mother wishes rather meanly that her son had a little more sadness to him, a little more angst -- in other words, feels more like what she feels. In the title story the missing person is a legendary delinquent older brother, who reappears as a clique of 10-13-year-olds are holding a car wash. The story does a wonderful job of showing how a seemingly thrilling adventure into the world of teenagers can rapidly turn scary.

"Island Cowboys" is about an adults, but its narrator is a somewhat immature adult. Angry about the course his life has taken, like the teenagers in the rest of the stories, he lashes unpredictably out at his family members. "Begin With An Outline" appears to be very directly autobiographical to an extent (Hemmings has said in interviews it was her first story, written in college), and features another missing parent, this time a pot-farmer father whose narrator daughter tries clumsily to reconnect with him. In "Secret Clutch" a sixteen-year-old boy is at his mother's wedding reception in the company of his beautiful nanny. As he slowly gets drunk, his confused sexual and emotional jealousy becomes more overt.

In "Ancient Weapons" a father and daughter abandoned by their wife/mother, spar with each other verbally, emotionally, and finally, physically. "Location Scouts" is about the strange needy relationship between a real estate agent mourning her fiancee's death and her teenage girl neighbor (whose mother is slowly dying). By unspoken arrangement, the girl tags along to open houses on Sundays with the older woman -- but the story tells of their attending a wake instead. "The After Party" is about a political family the day after the father has lost the race for governor. The wife/mother is absent, and the younger boy is scared of the ramifications of his father's failure. Meanwhile, the teenage daughter is sick of pretending that they have a perfect family, and confronts the father on his philandering and lies.

The stories bear the mark of having been heavily workshopped, not a word out of place, and oozing with mood. There's a somewhat ethereal quality to some of the endings which remind me (in a good way) a great deal of the two films directed by Sophia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation). Clearly, the book will be of interest to those interested in how teenagers and adults relate to one another, especially in times of loss or stress. The one other item of note is that teen sexuality is another major running theme, to a certain degree incest. There is a direct reference in one story, and there are undertones of it others, ranging from subtle to overt, and it makes for somewhat uneasy material. An interesting debut, I look forward to her forthcoming novel about Vail and how the ski industry affects small towns.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars punk rock, March 3, 2006

By 

Mark Flynn (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: House of Thieves (Hardcover)

I usually don't read short stories, but my girlfriend made me read House of Thieves and this collection was thrilling, entertaining and hilarious. Hemmings knows how to tell a good story and her writing is male, woman, and angst-ridden-teen-friendly.