Red Sky Over Hawaii

I enjoyed Sara Ackerman’s Island of Sweet Pies and Soldiers, so I was really excited to get her upcoming novel, Red Sky Over Hawaii. This is another historical novel set in Hawaii at the beginning of WWII.

This review contains spoilers! 

Lana Hitchcock thinks she’s heading home to visit her father in the hospital, but that’s not at all what happens. She quickly finds herself responsible for two young daughters of her German neighbors, and two Japanese neighbors, just as the FBI is rounding up enemy nationals. This theme of distrust towards Japanese Hawaiians was in Island of Sweet Pies and Soldiers as well, but now that I’ve lived on Oahu, and seen how Hawaiian life and food are connected with Japanese culture, it seems even stranger and more upsetting.

Fortunately, her father’s left her a map to a half-finished hidden home in the beautiful but fairly isolated jungle by the Kilauea volcano.  I’m reading in quarantine now,  with a 9:00 PM curfew here in Boston, and weird gaps on the grocery shelves, so I particularly enjoyed reading about their struggles to make the best of things and stay safe at home.

Before the book really opens, Lana’s marriage fell apart when she and her husband struggled to get pregnant. I don’t usually like tragic-infertile backstory, so I was delighted that her story did not wrap up with a surprise pregnancy! I dislike magical solutions of “when you stop worrying it happens” and I dislike babies as the end to a woman’s character arc. Instead, Lana finds family connection in Marie, Coco, Benji and Mochi, and Auntie, (and with Grant, to some extent, but she was never looking for romantic love, she was looking for her family).

I just loved the first 95% of this book, but found the ending too abrupt and easy. After chapters of wartime shortages, endless bad news in the background, awkwardly found families, the end jumps forwards a year and a half, and then has to back-explain how Grant and Lana worked everything out. I understand the impulse to bring our characters through the war, and yes, I was glad to see everyone made it safely, but it felt rushed and too easy, after a book about the slow and awkward forming of bonds under pressure.

Despite the rushed feeling in the last chapter, I’d still recommend this story of found family in a beautiful place.