A dying child’s life depends on her grandmother's explosive secrets about her tortured past and forbidden love.
A historical family saga spanning three unforgettable generations who meet in the brutal sugar cane fields of Hawaii where a savage crime and a failed strike draw the families into an uneasy alliance.
The Ohana is the only novel to accurately describe the beginning of the mob in Hawaii. My dad’s best friend in elementary school was a man who grew up to be one of the biggest mob bosses in Hawaii, uniting the Japanese, the Koreans, and Portuguese-Hawaiians. The Chinese were the first to form what people in Hawaii called “The Syndicate” which was understood to be the Hawaiian Mafia. My dad never joined but his friends liked playing poker at our house. It all ended the day I read an article in the newspaper about a man being gunned down less than a block from my house. I recognized the name and asked my dad if the story was about one of my “uncles.” In Hawaii, children always call family friends, uncle and aunty. All the poker games stopped after that day and I never saw any of the many “uncles” who came to my house to play cards.
In The Ohana except the bodyguard was blown up, not gunned down.
Years later I married a lawyer who represented every “godfather” in Hawaii for income tax evasion including my dad’s childhood friend.
Most of the stories in The Ohana are true. I kept stories tucked away in my brain and sometimes written down on scraps of paper. My first novel was over a thousand pages. The characters are mostly a combination of people I know very wellThere are so many treasures I gleaned from my mother and aunts. Big things, little things-like the Japanese officers who called my uncle a traitor before spitting in my his face when he interrogated them. The abject poverty alongside enormous wealth. The racism, the prejudice, the immigrants struggles to be equal. I salute this nation of immigrants because even the Native Americans immigrated across the land bridge from China to Alaska. Aloha and Mahalo for reading my novel.