YESTERDAY'S ISLAND

One-dimensional, one-note hokum. Before he was born, Kama's Polynesian mother and Irish father were banished from his mother's native island of Milanao off the Hawaiian mainland. His mother died soon after his birth, of an unspecified illness, and his father is now dead too, in an accident that "totaled [his] bike and himself." This small novel, short on pages but long on plot, follows Kama, twelve-years-old and big for his age, on a journey of revenge to kill the tyrannical Mrs. Sommers, the banisher, whose family owned the island for generations and thought they owned the people on it. Kama's dinghy sinks three miles from Milanao, but he is resuced by a boatman who knew his mother. Left sleeping, Kama awakens and makes his way to the big house. And there, all alone in the kitchen reading, is Mrs. Sommers, now old and frail, who welcomes him smilingly: Well it wasn't his mother who was banished; it was his father, a troublemaker. "She could have come back," but not he. All this is too much for Kama who puts the knife to the woman's throat but "couldn't kill her." Still angry, he destroys a little property instead. "Times change," says the boatman returning for him and taking him back to the mainland where adoptive parents await. A drag.