This is not an ordinary book: it's a BookCrossing book! BookCrossing books are world travelers - they like to have adventures and make new friends...and with your help, they can even write home to say what they've been doing! (You may remain anonymous if you wish.)

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Purchased new from Bess Press's da Shop: this is apparently meant to be the beginning of a series featuring Leilani Santiago. Since Naomi Hirahara is not from Hawaii, I'm curious to see how she does writing a story set here.

I wanted to like this, but I ended up quitting after about 20 pages. The things that bothered me are probably not a big deal for people from elsewhere, but...nobody who grew up here would call it a Hawaiian shirt. Mostly I think it was a poor style choice to have the story in first person. I understand that it makes it easier for the writer and most readers, but it doesn't make sense to me that someone who consistently speaks pidgin to her family and friends would have her internal dialogue in standard English...whether or not she went to UW. (I'll note here that my parents always said it was fine to speak pidgin but you needed to be bilingual - to be able to handle standard English as well.)

Reserved for my Asian diaspora VBB (round 2).

Wednesday, September 8, 2021: claimed from my Asian diaspora VBB and headed for Arkansas by media mail.

USPS tracking # 9549 0104 3302 1251 8526 51
ETA 9/28

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I finished this--pretty sure if I would have been like hyphen8 if I'd had any experience with Hawaii.
There wasn't a lot to the mystery, but it was a good tale of family and relationships.