House of Thieves

Kaui Hart Hemmings is a maestro of the poetic metaphor. I was thrilled to see House of Thieves after having read some of these great stories in literary magazines over the past few years. When I say she writes poetically, don't expect a drop of sentimentality. It's more in the `bon mot' sense that her prose cleverly articulates feelings and thoughts you might have assumed to be inexpressible. These stories all take place in Hawaii, but not the Hawaii that you think you know(unless you are Hawaiian). This isn't tourists drinking Mai-Tai's or `exhaling;' it's people in their complicated lives written about intimately without affect. The author writes convincingly from the point of view of a variety of characters and each story creates its unique, entirely-human microuniverse. Although it is almost always disingenuous to compare writers, it might still be edifying to give you a taste of what kind of ingredients you can expect to find in House of Thieves: Start with a dose of Russell Banks (circa Rule of the Bone), add an acerbic dash of Salinger, a touch of seductive glamour ala Fitzgerald, and perhaps a sardonic hint of pre-fall Winona Ryder in "Heathers." After all the high-(and low-)fallutin' associations, I should just cut to the chase. This stuff is real. It pulls you in. Also, it made me laugh... a lot.

I usually don't read short stories, but my girlfriend made me read House of Thieves and this collection was thrilling, entertaining and hilarious. Hemmings knows how to tell a good story and her writing is male, woman, and angst-ridden-teen-friendly.

I picked up this book because I went to college with a lot of middle to upper-middle class Hawaiians, and found their background kind of interesting. The nine short stories in this debut collection tend to revolve around the uneasy interactions of teenagers and adults, and the fragile emotional negotiations involved on each side. Hemmings was raised in the upper-middle class Hawaii portrayed in most of the stories, and though she studiously avoids taking an anthropological view toward the setting and its inhabitants, they stories can't help but provide a sense of some of the identity complexities of the mixed culture. It's too her credit though, that while the Hawaiian setting adds an element of interest (I probably wouldn't have picked the book up had it been set in Ohio), the stories could easily be relocated without any thematic discord. Loneliness, loss, and frustration, are three major threads established in the opening story, "The Minor Wars", in which a father and ten-year-old daughter struggle to coexist while their wife/mother lies in a coma. In the next story, "Final Girl", it's a mother and her thirteen-year-old son who are stuck together, long abandoned by their lover/father. It's a rather acerbic story, as the mother wishes rather meanly that her son had a little more sadness to him, a little more angst -- in other words, feels more like what she feels. In the title story the missing person is a legendary delinquent older brother, who reappears as a clique of 10-13-year-olds are holding a car wash. The story does a wonderful job of showing how a seemingly thrilling adventure into the world of teenagers can rapidly turn scary. "Island Cowboys" is about an adults, but its narrator is a somewhat immature adult. Angry about the course his life has taken, like the teenagers in the rest of the stories, he lashes unpredictably out at his family members. "Begin With An Outline" appears to be very directly autobiographical to an extent (Hemmings has said in interviews it was her first story, written in college), and features another missing parent, this time a pot-farmer father whose narrator daughter tries clumsily to reconnect with him. In "Secret Clutch" a sixteen-year-old boy is at his mother's wedding reception in the company of his beautiful nanny. As he slowly gets drunk, his confused sexual and emotional jealousy becomes more overt. In "Ancient Weapons" a father and daughter abandoned by their wife/mother, spar with each other verbally, emotionally, and finally, physically. "Location Scouts" is about the strange needy relationship between a real estate agent mourning her fiancee's death and her teenage girl neighbor (whose mother is slowly dying). By unspoken arrangement, the girl tags along to open houses on Sundays with the older woman -- but the story tells of their attending a wake instead. "The After Party" is about a political family the day after the father has lost the race for governor. The wife/mother is absent, and the