Customer Reviews

Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i

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Susanna Moore paints mesmerizing pictures with words. She begins her memoir with "No memory presents itself of my first acquaintance with the sea. It was always there, and I was always in it." What I soon discovered was that the pictures she paints are not so much of herself, but of the place she happened to be at the time, the oceans that surrounded it, and the books that kept her company.

Moore employs an unusual format for this book. Following each brief chapter is at least an equal number of pages filled with excerpts from classic tales of the sea, the constant companions of her youth. In her first chapter she says "One summer when my mother was recovering from a breakdown, we lived on the beach..." but never goes into any detail. Later she writes "I was overcome by the idea of shipwreck. I suspect the unconscious was doing its work. My family, while high-strung, was not a shipwreck quite yet, but I divined its coming." With voyeuristic lust I raced through twenty pages of shipwreck tales from Daniel Defoe and John Fiske, anxious to get back to Susanna's own story, only to find that it never really materializes.

In the next chapter, there is one brief mention of her father being a doctor, but nothing about his role in the family dynamics. Instead I learned about the Hawaiians themselves, and their attitude towards life. Moore tells us "One of my Hawaiian friends insisted that Hawaiians were not working class. The working class wanted televisions and motorboats, but Hawaiians didn't want anything." Following that, I waded through eighteen pages of excerpts from Herman Melville, Charles Darwin, Joseph Conrad and Herodotus, searching for a unifying theme that would tie into the chapter, but never finding one. This was the pattern for the remainder of the book.

Although I came away with a very clear picture of Hawaii, the "ravishing little world...redolent with romance" but also "an hierarchical, snobbish and quietly racist society," my picture of Susanna Moore remained fuzzy, and each chapter left me wanting more. While doing some research on the Internet, I discovered that she wrote an earlier memoir, titled I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i. Perhaps I should have read that one first.

by Becky Lane
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

I bought this book because I love Hawaii and wanted to re-visit the islands in my mind. Moore grew up there and wrote about her childhood, but the book falls short when she adds a plethora of passages from other books that influenced her. I wanted an entire book of her writing, but got extras that I wasn't really interested in reading. I ended up flipping past those to the meat of her narrative, and found it to be great. But not enough to fill a book -- hence why others were added. Not a great book as a whole.

I lived in Hawaii for six years so was very interested in reading this memoir. I found it to be shallow and at times hard to believe that it wasn't exaggerated. I had hoped for more depth and insight into Hawaii during her growing up years in the fifties. It did give me some idea of what it was like but the author, so full of herself and trying so hard to be clever was a real turn-off. It is nothing but another story of a very dysfunctional family. I had so hoped for more.