Lois-Ann Yamanaka

"In 1913, stricken by tuberculosis, young Anah, Aki, and Leah are sent away from their family for treatment at St. Joseph's, an orphanage in Hawaii's Kalihi Valley. Of the three, two will die there, in spite of the nuns' best efforts to save them, and only Anah, the eldest, will grow to adulthood. But the ghosts of the dead sisters are afraid to leave the grounds of St. Joseph's, where they wait until they can return home. As Anah prepares to begin married life away from the orphanage, they haunt her." -- Jacket.

A young mute boy and his parents learn the language of love.

Emi-Lou struggles to come of age in her middle school years in Hawaii.

A Japanese-American family in Hawaii receives a double shock when a son discovers his homosexuality and a daughter becomes pregnant out of marriage. The family are the Yagyuus, father a taxidermist, mother a science teacher, parents of three children and by the end of book grandparents of one. Final volume in a trilogy which began with 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.