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摘要
摘要
On a sultry Honolulu morning, a body washes up on a beach. For Eva Hanson, the only haole (Caucasian) among the group of women fishing who discover it, this becomes her kuleana, her obligation to report it to the police. But this body, not meant to be found, is missing when the police arrive. With no family and few friends, Eva, a European living under a stolen name on the fringes of society, becomes an easy target. Now a suspect in the missing man's death, Eva meets McClelland, a Scotsman with a past as mysterious as hers. Against her own instincts, she begins to fall in love. But McClelland has troubles of his own. And Eva cannot escape the growing maelstrom of political and social upheaval as conflicting cultures vie for control of the island: Royalists still loyal to the overthrown queen; politicians in favor of annexation to the United States; missionaries looking to spread Christianity; and Hawaiians hoping to salvage what they can of their homeland, once a paradise, now ravaged by riots and disease. With stunning prose that is both lush and sensual, Pamela Ball wondrously re-creates this unique period of time. Kuleana is a gorgeously written, evocative tale of an outsider thrust into intrigue-and the treacherous search for truth amid corruption and chaos.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
A chilling calm pervades this intriguing tale of imminent revolution, set in 1890s Hawaii. When the body of a wealthy island man is discovered on a Honolulu beach, locals nominate newcomer Eva Hanson to inform the police. The young Norwegian woman has a dubious reputation as a fortune-teller and dispenser of homeopathic sugar pills, but she is "haole, white-skinned, a color the police wouldn't be suspicious of." But when Eva enters the police station, she's put on the defensive, heatedly questioned about the dead man's identity. Now both the police and ubiquitous politician Cornelius Rhodes keep turning up at the house she shares with opium-addicted Lehua, demanding to know if Eva thinks the dead man was a Royalist, a follower of the deposed Queen Lili'uokalani. Gradually, Eva realizes that she is being framed for the man's death by Rhodes, an American colluding with black-suited missionaries to control the island. As martial law is declared, Eva knows she should flee, but she can't leave fragile Lehua, or her new love, McClelland, an elusive Scotsman with a family secret. There's more than a whiff of Out of Africa in the Eva/McClelland romance, but everything else about Ball's second novel after Lava, also set in Hawaii, is a revelation. The characters are wholly imagined creations but always just out of reach, damaged and a little dangerous, like the gorgeous, unstable island setting. Readers will be hooked by the understated mystery plot, but what they'll take away is the shock of cultural upheaval and the sting of Ball's prose, "beautiful as a curved knife." (Mar. 18) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Lyrically delivered but unfortunately tepid murder tale set against the backdrop of 1890s Hawaii. Ball (Lava, 1997) is never more certain of herself than in her first few pages, as a corpse over which there will be much ado wends through the waterways of Hawaii on a virtual tour of the island that's a miniature version of the book's own, sliding past Buddhist nuns and hula lessons, cockfights and tattoo parlors, then at last reaching the shoreline, where it's discovered by Eva, a red-haired haole fortuneteller whose real name isn't Eva and whose true identity, also, is supposed to be a mystery to drive us along. Same goes for the dead man: authorities are soon on Eva's trail with odd questions, both about the corpse and about her habit of selling sugar pills as medicine, but the more important question is whether the dead man was a Royalist-one of a secret group of Hawaiians trying to remain loyal to Queen Lili'uokalani as the Americans overrun their paradise with measles, leprosy, Christianity, and horny sailors who chase the many prostitutes that were inevitable in a land where adultery was never a big thing to begin with. After Eva stumbles across a mysterious rebel living clandestinely in her home and finds love at the unlikeliest of moments, with another haole named McClelland, we do eventually learn both the identity of the dead man and of Eva herself. But more interesting than that story is its historic backdrop of Hawaii's brief independence and the queen who is imprisoned by the invading militia. That's a much more compelling tale than Eva's and her private eye-style troubles, and Ball's writing, too, especially her gift for simile, seems at odds with her mystery-genre strategy. A pretty history weighed down by clunky genre artifice.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
This atmospheric history-mystery is set in Hawaii in 1895. Ball, winner of the Hemingway Short Fiction Award and the author of the critically acclaimed Lava (1997), was raised on Oahu and knows her subject well. The action turns on an outsider and outcast, Eva Hanson, a Norwegian fortune-teller and avid scam artist. Hanson is clairvoyant but not when she wants to be. All her survival skills are called upon when a body washes up on the beach, and Eva reports the death to the police. This act casts Eva at the center of the political storms shaking Hawaii and makes her both the suspect and a reluctant detective. Strong writing with wonderful details (the way the missionaries' houses were built to endure the northern winters that never come), a gutsy heroine, and compelling historical background make this one a winner. --Connie Fletcher
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
In Ball's second novel (after Lush), a dead body carried down from the hills behind Honolulu becomes the focal point of the seething unrest and political corruption during the last years of Queen Liliuokalani's reign in the 1890s. After discovering the corpse in a quiet cove, a group of native women are torn between reporting their gruesome discovery and concealing it from authorities, but at last they convince Eva the fortuneteller to contact the police. As a European immigrant, Eva is more likely to be believed and less likely to suffer any repercussions than her native friends. However, when she returns with the police, the body is gone, and Eva, a woman with a profession and a past shady enough to make her sympathetic to these disenfranchised islanders, is drawn into a web of political intrigue and treachery that epitomizes the conflicts racking the island kingdom. While Ball's lush and evocative tale is also a love story, it is the tormented queen, her island kingdom, and her people that truly haunt the reader. A thought-provoking tale; for larger collections. Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.