Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers

In her exuberant first novel, Lois-Ann Yamanaka tells the story of young Lovey Nariyoshi in Hilo, Hawai'i, on the big island of Hawai'i. Lovey's best friend is effeminate and endearing; her father at once loving and brutal; and her entire family is caught in a cultural gap between East and West. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers embraces an array of familial issues as Lovey forges an identity of her own in a world where Japanese-Americans find no facsimile of themselves in pop culture or media, no trace of their inner lives in the stories they read, and where the unpalatable is served on a plate of uncertainty. At once a bitingly funny satire of "white" happiness and a moving meditation on what is real, ugly at times, but true, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers crackles with the language of pidgin - Hawaiian Creole - distinguishing one of the most vibrant new voices in contemporary culture.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.