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Honolulu
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
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Publisher's summary
Set in the 1920s and 1930s, Honolulu explores the stark contrast between the image of the glamorous Hawaiian paradise portrayed to the mainland and the harsh reality of life on the island. With characters as vivid and richly descriptive as the history of Hawaii itself, this novel is sure to enthrall listeners.
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This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters, since it is the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the 20th century.
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Narration style kills the story.
- By Glynis on 11-27-14
By: Howard Fast
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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The Bonesetter's Daughter
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan, Joan Chen
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is being unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, brilliantly presents "storytelling in its oldest and truest form".
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Exceptionally good
- By Eileen Finn on 03-25-03
By: Amy Tan
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The Joy Luck Club
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Gwendoline Yeo
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Four Chinese women, drawn together by the shadow of their past, meet in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and to "say" stories to each other. Nearly 40 years later, one of the women has died, and her daughter arrives to take her place. However, the daughter never expected to learn of her mother's secret lifelong wish - and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation creates among the women an urgent need to remember the past.
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Joy Luck - abridged
- By Leslie Teicholz on 03-16-04
By: Amy Tan
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Half a Lifelong Romance
- A Novel
- By: Eileen Chang
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Manzhen is a young worker in a Shanghai factory where she meets Shijun, the son of wealthy merchants. Despite family complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together - until circumstances force them apart. When they are reunited after many years, can they start their relationship again? Or is it destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime?
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super
- By Marcus Aurelius on 10-05-17
By: Eileen Chang
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The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
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Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
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Grand Central
- Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion
- By: Melanie Benjamin, Amanda Hodgkinson, Pam Jenoff, and others
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, through the whispering gallery, beneath the ceiling of stars, and past the information booth and its beckoning four-faced clock, to whatever destination is calling them. It is a place where people come to say hello and good-bye. And each person has a story to tell.
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Grand Central: Memories
- By ZacharyKindle Customer on 05-03-17
By: Melanie Benjamin, and others
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GI Brides
- The Wartime Girls Who Crossed the Atlantic for Love
- By: Duncan Barrett, Nuala Calvi
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
The "friendly invasion" of Britain by over a million American G.I.s bewitched a generation of young women deprived of male company during the Second World War. With their exotic accents, smart uniforms, and aura of Hollywood glamour, the G.I.s easily conquered their hearts, leaving British boys fighting abroad green with envy. But for girls like Sylvia, Margaret, Gwendolyn, and even the skeptical Rae, American soldiers offered something even more tantalizing than chocolate, chewing gum, and nylon stockings: An escape route from Blitz-ravaged Britain.
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Wonderful true stories of very brave women
- By Cindy on 05-12-15
By: Duncan Barrett, and others
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
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Overall
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Story
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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The Postcard
- By: Leah Fleming
- Narrated by: Elaine Claxton
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
2002, Australia. When Melissa discovers a postcard addressed to 'Desmond' among her recently deceased father's effects, she is determined to discover this person's identity and his relationship to her father. She soon embarks on a journey that will take her across oceans and into the past...
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Meh
- By Summer Layne on 03-06-15
By: Leah Fleming
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The Sugar Camp Quilt
- By: Jennifer Chiaverini
- Narrated by: Christina Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jennifer Chiaverini's New York Times best-selling Elm Creek Quilt novels, with their irresistible blend of storytelling magic and quilting lore, have captured the hearts of countless fans. In this moving novel about morality, freedom, and the power of human courage, Chiaverini whisks listeners back to antebellum America.
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Take Two
- By Nana Quilter on 06-09-06
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Saints for All Occasions
- A Novel
- By: J. Courtney Sullivan
- Narrated by: Susan Denaker
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Nora and Theresa Flynn are 21 and 17 when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan - a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand.
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The narration ruined it
- By Janis Reynolds on 06-12-17
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Learn to pronounce Hawaiian words before narrating
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The most recent state to join the union, Hawaii is the only one to have once been a royal kingdom. After its discovery by Captain Cook in the late 18th century, Hawaii was fought over by European powers determined to take advantage of its position as the crossroads of the Pacific. The arrival of the first missionaries marked the beginning of the struggle between a native culture with its ancient gods, sexual libertinism, and rites of human sacrifice and the rigid values of the Calvinists.
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Good, but not enough history of the Island.
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Learn to pronounce Hawaiian words before narrating
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Forced to attend the Student Retention Office's summer retreat, Professor Molly brings her game of buzzword bingo to fend off boredom. But when a serial harasser collapses face-first into his haupia cheesecake, the event goes from dull to disastrous. Now Molly has to fight to keep her best friend out of the worst kind of trouble - and herself off the unemployment line.
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Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there’s a lot she doesn’t understand. She’s never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history.
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Ua mau ke ea o ka `aina i ka pono
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Under a promising morning sky, police captain Walter Alaka'i makes a tragic discovery: the body of a teenage surfer bobbing among the lava rocks of Maui's southeastern shore. It appears to be an ill-fated accident, but closer inspection reveals something far more sinister than the results of a savage wave gone wrong. Now that Alaka'i is looking at a homicide, he solicits the help of his niece, Detective Kali Mahoe.
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Maika’i
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Hawaii
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Much to My Surprise, I Really Liked It
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By: James A. Michener, and others
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Freckled
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We live in a place everyone calls paradise. Sure, Kauai’s beautiful, with empty beaches, drip-castle mountains, and perfect surf...but we’ve been "camping" for six months, eating boiled chicken feed for breakfast, and wearing camouflage clothes so no one sees us trespassing in our jungle hideout. The cockroaches leave rainbow colors all over everything from eating the crayons we left outside the tent, and now a tractor is coming to scrape our camp into the river. Standing in front of the tent in my nightgown, I know my own truth: I just want to be normal.
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Zero to Hero
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By: T. W. Neal
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Hawaiian Mythology: The Legends and Myths of Hawaii
- The Fables and Folk-Lore of a Strange People
- By: King David Kalakaua
- Narrated by: James Francis Markert
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Dive into the captivating realm of The Legends and Myths of Hawaii, where the mystical allure of the Pacific islands comes alive through the mesmerizing fables and folk-lore shared by none other than the esteemed King David Kalakaua. Prepare to be transported to a time when oral traditions were the heart of Hawaiian culture, as the illustrious monarch weaves a tapestry of enchanting stories that have been cherished for generations.
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Isn’t there a Hawaiian narrator that could’ve done this?
- By Apelila Newby on 10-11-23
What listeners say about Honolulu
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- P Hermes
- 05-22-12
Very Distracting Narrator
I live in Hawai'i. This historical fiction contains many elements familiar to even a casual student of Oahu's history, while using a picture bride as his plot device emphasizes the cultural aspects of our local story.
I found the narrator's mangled Hawai'ian very distracting. Especially in a historical fiction containing place names still in use, one ought to make an effort to pronounce words correctly. Listening to Pa-LAH-muh mispronounced PAL-a-ma and LILY-ha used instead of Lee-LEE-ha, to point out only two simple examples of many, was very irritating; It was distracting to the point of turning off the book several times and not returning to it for weeks. I do have to say, though, that she sings a couple of little tunes within the narration, and has a very sweet voice.
BTW, it's HO-NO-lu-lu (long O sound), not Hon-a-LU-lu (short O sound) and Ha-VA-ee, not Hs-WHY-ee. If one cannot get these two primary pronunciations, what chance does something like Kawaiahao or Kahahawai have?
Fortunately, I don't speak Korean, so I can't comment on any of those words,
**for anyone who might think this is nit-picking, think of how it might be listening to a book if Penn-syl-VA-nia was constantly pronounced Pen-SYL-van-ia or FLO-ri-da was Flo-ri-DA or WASH-ing-ton was Wa-SHING-ton? It is grating and distracting, partly because it is so easily preventable.
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47 people found this helpful
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- T. Arcangel
- 05-31-13
Place names - oh, why don't readers ask?
Would you listen to Honolulu again? Why?
Probably not. I rarely listen to books twice.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Honolulu?
I was fascinated by the entrances of historical figures into the story. Detective Chang Apana and Henry Kahahawai were already familiar names to me. Even after living in Hawaii for almost 40 years, I had not heard of "Panama Dave" Baptiste and May Thompson, who were also real residents of Honolulu.
What aspect of Ali Ahn’s performance would you have changed?
Ali Ahn was a good reader, but her mispronunciation of Hawaiian place names drove me to distraction. Like most mainlanders, she pronounces the name of this city, "Hahnahlulu" instead of "Honolulu". Ewa is pronounced "Ehvah", not "ee-wah". When she read "Palama" and "Waimanalo" I had to pause to figure out where she was talking about. How I wish readers would ASK a local resident how to pronounce place names.
If you could rename Honolulu, what would you call it?
The Picture Bride
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7 people found this helpful
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- Dubi
- 02-11-17
Not Really Honolulu
The most important thing to know about Honolulu, since the title may be why it has hit your radar, is that is not about Honolulu or Hawaii. Hours 11-13 are about a series of crimes and trials that proved pivotal in the social history of Hawaii, but otherwise, Hawaii functions solely as a generic setting -- any locale with plantations, factories, and exploited immigrants would have sufficed.
The book would have been better had it stayed in Korea, where it begins. Hawaii only enters into the equation when the protagonist/narrator elects to go there as a picture bride, paid to marry a man she has never met in order to escape a culture that devalues women and to emigrate to what promises to be a land of paradise and wealth but is not. It is an interesting story and would have been better told within Korean society, as an historical novel of Korea.
Other than the two hours about the Massey trial, there are virtually no Hawaiians in the story, and few Americans (haoles). The characters are almost all Korean or other Asian ethnicities. The non-Asians are merely placeholders for the trial phase. Even that section is out of place -- other than telling us about it and how she felt, the narrator's story does not advance during that part. It reads like the Wikipedia page about the trial (yes, I read the Wikipedia page).
The main character. She is a saint. Seriously, she's up there with Mother Teresa. Hard to dislike her, she does go through some hard times (paling in comparison to typical historical dramas, cf. The Joy Luck Club). But you need a little moral ambiguity to drive character development. There is scant conflict to drive the plot, even fewer plot complications -- what little there is usually resolves quickly with positive outcomes. Her tale is charismatically read by Ali Ahn, though others point out her poor Hawaiian pronunciation. Alan Brennert's writing annoyingly forces her to use I and we instead of me and us in the objective case to make her sound foreign.
None of this makes this a bad book. It's just slightly above average, but falsely advertised as being about Hawaii. Not that I wanted a sanitized story from the tourists' eye view of Hawaii, not that oppression and discrimination did not take place, but this depiction of Hawaii as hell does not jive with the reality that I've seen and studied. Nor does it jive with the protagonists' real story except as a location.
If Hawaii is what you want, I recommend The Descendants or Hotel Honolulu, or one of a number of books, fictional and non-fictional, about the Massey Trial. Even James Michener's Hawaii. Or, as an alternative, try Brenner's Palisades Park -- an excellent book that lives up to its title, a similar story (solid if unspectacular) about an immigrant family and social and racial injustice, set around the amusement park once located on the cliffs overlooking the Hudson River and New York City (where I went as a child).
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6 people found this helpful
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- Jenn F. Garcia
- 04-13-13
Such a beautiful story!
I have to say this is the best book I've read this year and the second best book I've ever read.
I love historicals with rich views on other countries and cultures. I also love books about family. But this book was so much more. This was a book about a strong woman, who despite every single obstacle she was faced with, rose above. And it's important to know that not only did she continue but she accomplished so much more than anyone could have ever imagined. Her road was difficult and filled with so many twists and turns, rights and wrongs, and happy and sad moments.
The author had a wide group of side characters that quickly became very important. He brought them all alive and gave them strong roles in the story. He was able to bring out so much emotion in me that I hadn't sobbed or laughed this much since I read The Shoemaker's Wife by Adrianna Trigiani.
Not only did the author succeed in throwing us into the lives of these characters, but he took us on a tour of Korea and Oahu. His descriptions were vivid and amazing and made me feel that I was there seeing it with my own eyes.
This is one of those books that will "stick" with me forever and I recommend this for anyone that wants to be a part of a rich vivid tale of a strong woman.
The audio performance was okay ... pronunciations were not the best and that is important in audio books but the story was so good it was almost forgivable.
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- Wallen
- 04-20-11
A good read
I liked this book, which tells the story of a group of immigrants to the US (Hawaii) and how they are frowned upon by so called better people (ordinary Americans and other immigrants). How they fight for their lives and how they survive and finally suceed (in a way) by sheer perseverance and doggedly hard work is a very good story, not lacking in suspense. Well told and well worth listening to.
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- Blaine
- 02-03-12
Fantastic story and performance
MOLOKA'I is one of my favorite books of all time, so it was with a little trepidation that I embarked upon HONOLULU. I needn't have worried. Mr. Brennert is a master storyteller, and the narration by Ali Ahn was spot-on. I loved this book ! In addition to an engaging story, I learned a tremendous amount about Hawaiian culture and history. The characters are memorable, and the story is unforgettable. Highly recommended !!!
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- Diana
- 03-22-11
Interesting
Glad I got this one. It was very interesting about the history of the introduction of Asian people into the fabric of the Hawaiian culture.
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- TM
- 05-07-19
Predictable and Unrealistic
This beautiful story became marked by classic little time movie network themes. It is unrealistic for the time and not worth finishing.
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- Kailua Tutu
- 03-12-19
Narrator KILLS the language (Literally)
The book was very interesting and it was a surprise the Massey case was included in the book. I read "Rape in Paradise" the account as told by a reporter from the Star Bulletin newspaper, many years ago. It still hurts, and still there is a stigma against the local people.
Read this book as it's good story of Honolulu and the timeline.
Audible please get someone who at least can pronounce the Hawaiian words. Nothing against this lady but it's hard to listen to someone through the whole book who can't even pronounce "Ewa" correctly.
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- Brittny Hansen
- 01-16-16
Fantastic Vacation Read
I purchased this book in preparation for a trip to Hawaii with my husband. It was perfect to get me in the mood for our trip as well as a great beach read. It was very interesting to get a taste of the history of the island of Oahu before visiting and definitely helped me to see the island and its people in a different light. I think the book was well researched and really gave me a view into a completely different world than my own. I would highly recommend it.
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