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Title details for Hula by Jasmin Iolani Hakes - Available

Hula

by Jasmin Iolani Hakes
Mapuana Makia
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available

Audiofile Magazine Earphones Award Winner

  • Named a Best Book of the Summer by Harper's Bazaar and ELLE

    "Stunning...an intricately built novel that spans decades, moving in and out of a collective voice, while also telling Hi'i's deeply personal and devastating story of trying to find her way." –Los Angeles Times

    "A full-throated chant for Hawai'i. . . . It's impossible to come away unchanged." —KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN, author of the PEN/Hemingway award-winning Sharks in the Times of Saviors

    Set in Hilo, Hawai'i, a sweeping saga of tradition, culture, family, history, and connection that unfolds through the lives of three generations of women—a tale of mothers and daughters, dance and destiny.

    "There's no running away on an island. Soon enough, you end up where you started."

    Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there's a lot she doesn't understand. She's never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history.

    In hula, Hi'i sees a chance to live up to her name and solidify her place within her family legacy. But in order to win the next Miss Aloha Hula competition, she will have to turn her back on everything she had ever been taught, and maybe even lose the very thing she was fighting for.

    Told in part in the collective voice of a community fighting for its survival, Hula is a spellbinding debut that offers a rare glimpse into a forgotten kingdom that still exists in the heart of its people.

    • Creators

    • Publisher

    • Release date

      May 2, 2023

    • Formats

      • OverDrive Listen audiobook

        • ISBN: 9780063276994
        • File size: 309191 KB
        • Duration: 10:44:08

    • Languages

      • English

    • Reviews

      • Publisher's Weekly

        Starred review from March 27, 2023
        Hakes’s ambitious and poignant debut centers on a Hawaiian girl’s coming-of-age in Hilo. Laka Naupaka returns to Keaukaha in 1968 with her newborn baby daughter, Hi’i, after a brief stint working at a Maui resort. Her family, though, keep themselves at a distance and denounce Hi’i, who looks white, as a “haole.” As Hi’i grows up, she develops a thick skin to shield herself from the constant rumors that she was found behind a dumpster. Soon enough, Hi’i begs her mom to enroll her in a hula school. Laka, a former Miss Aloha Hula, reluctantly agrees. Meanwhile Laka’s mother, Hulali, a pillar of the burgeoning native Hawaiian movement, is deeply invested in promoting Hawaiian culture, language, and history, and relentlessly exhorts Laka to turn over Hi’i’s birth certificate so that she can be recognized as Hawaiian like the rest of the Naupaka family. When Hi’i’s lineage is eventually revealed, matters are further complicated for the family as well as for Hi’i’s dreams of hula. Hakes studs the story with marvelous details of Hawaiian cosmology and historical developments such as the formation of the Hawaiian kingdom and the purpose of hula (“It was our generational memory, our celestial genealogy. Hula told the story of who we were”). Hakes illuminates on every page. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management.

      • AudioFile Magazine
        Two Hawaiian women are caught up in the contemporary battle between colonial encroachment and Hawaiian sovereignty. Laka Naupaka returns to Hilo and her august family with a pale redheaded baby named Hi'i, offering no explanations and keeping her distance from her mother. Narrator Mapuana Makia voices the women central to the story with the strength, passion, and pain that fuel them. Hi'i grows into a child who is unsure of her place in the Hawaiian community and devoted to being Miss Aloha Hula like her mother. A chorus perspective of the Hawaiian people ties the story of family and responsibility to the political history of the islands. Makia's deft handling of the frequent Hawaiian words and dialect perfectly evokes the culture and people of Hilo. S.T.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

    Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

    subjects

    Languages

    • English

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