School for Hawaiian Girls
 Georgia Ka'apuni McMillen
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2002 1stBook Library
  ISBN: 0759627339


The rape & murder in the 1920s of a student at the Christian run School for Hawaiian Girls, in a sugar cane field nearby, was never solved. No one was ever convicted & no white man's justice meted out. While Lydia was a beautiful girl on the edge of womanhood, she already had a secret, & though she was beloved by all, she was also berated by the school's headmistress for falling short of her potential.

Justice comes, however, in many guises, & all those who were guilty of killing the young woman, whether by their deeds or their passions, have suffered for it. The minister with his tortured morality, his twisted, lascivious son, & his prudish bitter daughter; or Lydia's over-loving, amoral brother, & her jealous fearful sister -- all were touched & damaged by that death so long ago.

School for Hawaiian Girls is told in a fierce chorus of voices, speaking of a dreadful past & a hopeful future. Sam, terribly warped as a boy caught between the death of his parents' culture & his sisters' future in the white man's world; now a wealthy man, seemingly generous yet working on his sixth wife, & ultimately, driven to cruelty & destruction by his secrets.

Moani, Sam's grand niece, a fearless, self-assured woman of substance with a thriving tourist kayaking business & ready for a change. Caring for her sister who was brain damaged since childhood in the car crash that killed their mother; she is struggling to give Puanani both an interesting & a relatively independent life. Moani's biological clock has rung its last alarm & she's frantic for family. When she decides to buy an abandoned schoolhouse & its manse, she stirs up memories in her Uncle Sam & Aunt Bernie, that they long ago silenced.

Sarah, once the daughter of a minister & headmistress of respected religious schools, is now in her dotage & cared for by a young woman who is unaware that she is a descendant of that riven family. When Moani finds Sarah & insists on seeing her, Sarah sucks on her secrets as her memories of that killing and of her own illicit actions percolate. Unrecalcitrant & saturated with bitterness, Sarah nostalgically remembers her golden years, & how unrepentant were her charges as she set about training them in her father's religious, social & alien principles.

School for Hawaiian Girls is a haunting, fierce & vivid parable about what happens when one culture conquers another & by fair means & foul, sets about humiliating & eradicating their way of life. When Westerners came into Paradise, carting their self-righteous mores & their own personal demons, they expected the native population to be grateful for its re-education. What they got was a living hell of suspicions, superstitions & soul-destroying tragedy.

A stunning, satisfying mystery! Well written & finely tuned, with a glimpse of the lush paradise islands, & the dark impulses that drive us humans into our misery! Thank you, Georgia Ka'apuni McMillen, for a super read!

Georgia Ka'apuni McMillen lives on the island of Maui where she practices law. She was raised in Honolulu. She is a Graduate of the Kamehameha Schools, the University of Hawai'i & the New York Law School. Her fiction has appeared in Bamboo Ridge: Journal of Hawai'i Literature and Arts. School for Hawaiian Girls is her first novel.
(05/05/02)

Rebecca