The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 June 2021
by Austin Aslan
Honolulu is the most remote large population center in the world. All of Hawaii's islands sit out there in the middle of the Pacific, beacons of relaxed beauty, susceptable to volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. Periodically, the islands are stricken by a seige mentality, most recently with the drop in airline travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Usually, though, in normal times, threats of a shipping strike or the next oncoming hurricane (usually just missing the islands), bring people out to the markets, hoarding white rice and toilet paper. But what if it all came crashing down at once? What if the isolation became complete, overnight? No shipping, no flights, no communications of any kind? This is the stuff of apocalyptic novels and chillingly relevant in a world coping with climate change, cyber terrorism and pandemic fears.
High school junior Leilani is a girl of mixed heritage, with a Hawaiian mother of ali'i stock and a white college professor father. She is a surfer and she suffers from epilepsy controlled by medication. (We will leave the question of whether this book realistically depicts epilepsy to those who know more about the affliction.) The book opens with her surfing and facing the kind of mild alienation that comes at the hands of Hawaiians of truer blood. She then travels with her father to Oahu to take part in a drug trial for a new epilepsy medication. She and her father find themselves several islands away from home when a mysterious green apparition in the sky (or is it celestial?) brings disaster upon disaster to the planet. Soon, they are entirely cut off from what was civilization, and the book becomes an epic adventure in merely getting home. Hawaii is benign enough with some technilogical civilization, but when it shuts down, and no large boats are traveling, no planes are flying, no phones are working and certainly no internet, people suspicious of helping one another to survive, the journey of a couple hundred miles becomes the march of weeks of fear and terror. All the predictable apocalyptic notions are present here, but with a Hawaiian touch. The expected breakdown of social order, for example, is driven largely by the native Hawaiian disdain for over a century of occupation from outside forces. Now is the time for the restoration of Hawaiian sovereignty. It doesn't help that everyone is fighting over the last scraps of food and fuel along the way.
But what of the cause of this epic disaster? How to respond to a collapse of technology that could well result in every nuclear plant in the world melting down and contaminating the entire ecosystem? What the heck is that enormous glowing green light in the sky? Is it really the end of the world, or does it just seem that way because of the extreme isolation of these islands? As Leilani and her father attempt to make their way home, a trip fraught with cliff-hanger adventure, it begins to dawn on Leilani what all of this means, and whether, in her tiny modest way, she can piece together a plan to avert world-ending disaster.
The book itself is light enough on detail and heavier on well-described death-defying adventure through the islands. It is seasoned with bits of Hawaiian culture and ritual, as well as the tensions that run through a proud but colonized and annexed kingdom. A good choice if you're looking for a colorful angle on the genre of apocalypse and the fragility of our civilization.