100 books like Diamond Head

I’m a bit of a fangirl when it comes to Sara Ackerman. I love all of her books about real people in Hawaii during World War II. Her characters are believable and compelling, and the Hawaiian setting is a different aspect of World War II than is usually presented. This book features a close-knit group of women who open a pie stand near a military base. Violet’s husband has disappeared without a word, and she suspects her daughter knows something she isn’t telling. When tension and suspicions rise among neighbors, the women are accused of being spies, and Violet must keep her friends and family safe. 

Laura’s fiancé and father die, and she travels from San Francisco to Hawaii to live with missionary relatives. It’s 1886, and Honolulu is the sophisticated bustling capital of a prosperous modern kingdom. Laura’s missionary relatives actively work to bring down the monarchy while Laura goes to work for the royal family. She builds quite a bond with the last queen, Lili`uokalani, who is trying to save her kingdom. This book tells the compelling story of the Hawaiian kingdom’s last days from a point of view inside the royal family. 

I truly enjoy historical fiction that presents a culture or era from a different point of view. This one is set in early twentieth-century Hawaii. It features a girl, Letty, returning from a boarding school on the mainland. Letty’s devoted to animals, and she is one of the first female veterinarians in history. She jumps into the ocean to save a horse. Her healing powers are strengthened by her connection to the ancient Hawaiian land. The undercurrent of power gives this novel a fantasy feel, but it doesn’t lose its historical aspect. Then Letty learns the price of her healing power—her kisses can kill. Even worse, she’s attracted to the man who owns the horse she saved. 

This is one of three historical novels by Alan Brennert set in Hawaii. I like this one best because it is set in 1914, not long before my own novel opens in Honolulu. It portrays a very different side of the city, however. Brennert’s novel features a Korean picture bride who is married off to a poor laborer who mistreats her. She and her fellow picture brides come together to improve their lives, resulting in a unique portrayal of Waikiki before the highrises, of the tenements in Chinatown, and the plantations before powerful unions.

This collection of short stories offers a contemporary Hawaiʻi full of flawed characters who face challenges both unique to the islands and universal in motivation.

Kahakauwila explores the concept of paradise and the price paid for it. They are stories that capture the spirit and tenacity of Hawaiʻi, the nuanced layers of its social fabric, and brings me home every time I read them. 

The first time I read it, I was alone in a cabin in the woods in the middle of my first writing residency. Suddenly I was no longer pressed up against a wood stove trying to stay warm. Through her gifted storytelling, all the sights and sounds and smells of home came rushing in, both comforting and familiar.

You don’t need to know Hawaiʻi to enjoy this book, but by the end of reading it, you will feel like you do.

When sixteen-year-old Leilani and her father traveled to O’ahu from Hilo to try a promising but experimental treatment for her epilepsy, they never expected to be stranded in the middle of a worldwide geomagnetic storm. With tsunamis striking randomly, all modern technology broken, and facing food shortages under martial law, Leilani and her father have to fight their way home. Along the way, Leilani discovers that the one thing that makes her different may be the one thing that saves us all. It’s an apocalyptic page-turner centered on Hawaii’s ecology and traditional cultural solutions.

When I was growing up, all I learned about my home was the year Hawaiʻi became a state.

My mother forbid me from speaking local pidgin at home because of the prevailing stereotype that locals were uneducated, unrefined, and not able to understand the complexities of the wider world.

Television and film portrayed people from Hawaiʻi as pagans needing saving from themselves, who drank and sinned themselves to death unless saved by white foreigners. In more ways than one, the loss of the Hawaiian Kingdom was placed on the shoulders of leaders too weak and simple-minded to maintain and protect it.

Hawai’i’s Story challenges that. Written by Queen Liliʻiuokalani after she was imprisoned and overthrown by a group backed by U.S. Marines and intended to aid in the fight against annexation, this memoir reveals a Hawaiian Kingdom that is the most literate nation in the world at the time and… show more.

Despite the scholarly title, this book is a highly readable account of traditional Hawaiian culture in Ka‘ū, the southernmost district of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Mary Kawena Pukui (1895–1986) was a preeminent Hawaiian scholar, author, composer, hula expert, and educator. She was born and raised in Ka‘ū, a remote, rural area where the old culture endured outside of the Westernization of the islands. In 1935 she traveled home with anthropologist E.S. Handy to gather information from her elders. Their book provides details and insights about the district’s history and ecology, the legendary setting (gods and spirits), the extended household and kinship system, the life cycle of individuals, manners and customs, and the relationships between people and ancestral spirits and animals.

Hawaiian Fishing Traditions celebrates famous Hawaiian fishermen. Fish was the main source of protein. The first story, by Moke Manu, tells of Kū‘ula-kai, who became deified as a god of fishermen because of his power to control fish. He built the first fishpond, in Hāna, Maui, to supply the chief and people with food. His son ‘Ai‘ai, featured in the second story, continued his father’s good work by locating offshore fishing grounds and teaching the people how to catch fish, practice conservation, and distribute the catch with generosity. Also included are the stories of other legendary fishermen and of battles with man-eating sharks. Two articles in the appendix describe the vast array of traditional fishing methods; a third article gives an anthropological account of the worship of shark gods.

In the ’70s through the early ’90s, Hawaiʻi went through massive social change.

There was a growing consciousness of the manipulation and exploitation that had accompanied Hawaiʻi’s colonization. With that came a collective desire to right the wrongs of history.

Trask describes the institutional racism, discrimination, and closed doors she faced as she attempted to forge a path for Native Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaiʻi while participating in a growing movement against continued occupation. 

While working on my book, some suggested I soften the political thread woven within the story. It was Trask’s essay “Lovely Hula Hands” (a chapter of From a Native Daughter) that encouraged me to stay true to the portrayal of Hawaiʻi that countered the unflawed, pristine playground image sold to tourists.

Written at a time when Hawai’i’s history was still being glossed over, Trask’s interviews and essays provide an unapologetic perspective and… show more.