Customer comments on this Youngstown Ohio Book
 Good lesson in history of war not often told.
The writting is poetic making the characters real and emphasing their feelings and courage--especially moving is their suffering.
One of the saddest books I've ever read
This book was unlike anything else I've ever read. It was incredibly tragic and haunting. It made me feel for those women like Sunny, the ones who became nobody, because their minds couldn't get out of the past yet their bodies moved on through time. It really is haunting and although I didn't like it at first, because it was an unusual style for me, I grew to appreciate it. It's powerful and sad, and wonderful, too.
 A Compelling Universal Tapestry
I will not recount the story; the other reviewers do it, and for my money, the story is marvelous. Like so many, I did not want this book to end, and rationed reading it for that reason. I cannot think of any other writer I have ever read who can capture in concrete, substantial, palpable images abstractions like jazz, or pain, or love, or wistfulness. The visuals her words sculpt are staggering. Hardly essential to an appreciation of this magnificent work, if you have lived in Hawaii, ever had an appreciation of either or both of its indigenous and diverse cultures, been entranced by music, felt the power and mystery of natural things, it will resonate with you on innumerable levels. You will learn a fair amount of Hawaiian along the way if you care to, and you should, as it is a beautiful and evocative and incredibly musical language. The book is more than poetry--it is, in many ways, a great mele. It speaks of essences, of life's value, its challenges, its losses, its pain. There are parts as profound and compact in that as any philosophy one could want (the small chapterlet recounting Malia's last visit with Pono may be the best piece of writing in that regard I have ever read). The political material through the book is, if you read closely, not polemical, but balanced if with a clear but hardly simplistic preference. And on a societal level, it is a magnificent paean to the power of women, especially their power over men, wanted or not, and the consequences, marvelous and horrific, of that power. If you are a woman, or you truly love them as I do, you will hold this book fiercely to your heart. Those who say Ms. Davenport embraced too much in too complex a way--with which I totally disagree--would probably say the same of Thomas Wolfe, whose prose at times hers resembles, several of whose works I number among my favorites in the language. I would rate this book higher than any I have reviewed on Amazon to date, and among the best novels I have ever read--and I have read thousands.
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