Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
By Lois-Ann Yamanaka (276 pages)
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Bookish rating: 3

Here's the thing with books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: You feel really obligated to really like the book. If you don't, you must entertain the possibility that you are not a very capable, sophisticated reader. And no bookish girl wants to believe THAT.

Here, Yamanaka's collection of stories is nicely done, providing some intensely creative insight into the back woods (does Hawai'i have woods?) of the Hilo area on the Big Island in the 1970s. It's a blue-collar area, and Lovey Nariyoshi comes of age with her BFF Jerry. Her family is Japanese-American, but Lovey longs to be and do things like the haole (translation: white) kids. Her parents, of course, mock this (understandable) adolescent yearning for something perceived as better, and the poor girl has a rough time reconciling identity with her burning desire to have a particular clothing item or a tape recorder.

Together, Yamanaka's stories successfully give a stirring impression of adolescence, Japanese-American assimilation in Hawai'i, and the almost-poverty of some of its inhabitants and exposes the fact that, like any tropical place colonized in one way or another, the islands are not all about surfing and suntan oil.

All that said, reading this book was slow going and tiresome at times. I could see the literary tricks Yamanaka pulled off, but I really felt like I was reading this for class. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a good book--just not one that I enjoyed much.