Emily M’s Reviews > Shark Dialogues > Status Update

"'Mahalo, Grandfather. Run Run, too, says I favor her. But she and I...' 'I know.' He patted her arm... 'She talked for years. I listened. You are so much alike. She saw her stubbornness in you, knew she would never quite control her. Each of you disturb her, because each of you carry different traits that are all part of her.' Vanya joked. 'You mean she recognizes how impossible she is!'"

“Yet something audible, like footsteps, walked softly in the dark beside them…And what they heard, resounding softly in the air…was one simple word, a sound…HULI. Revolution. Elders shivered, remembering the word from other centuries, memory chains linking back to warrior days. For, in the word was something sacred, ancestral, nearly forgotten: valor.”

“‘Lay de pain down. Leave it here wif me. Pick up your rage. Rage give you courage.’ As she and Simon left Digger sang out after them, stabbing the air with his walking stick. ‘Who dreamed de land? Who sing about it? We! We da land!’”

"But she was fair, let Run Run take the girls to Mass and teach them her...version of religion. 'God not da faddah, he just the spoiled moody child, but you got to go t'rough him to get to da real power, his mama, Mot'er God...She run the heavens alone. Original single parent. When somethin' bad happen, usually mean she let God try his hand, and he screw up plenny.'"

“Rachel meet her many cousins, come close to t’ree of dem, Vanuatu, Jessamyn, Ming…Come back every summer, like Dey addicted to Big Island. What I t’ink is, dey addicted to Pono*,like swimmers addicted to da sea. Yeah, shoah, sea da mot’er of us all, but you no can tell, sometime da bottom drop, suck swimmers down…”

*The magic-woman grandma

"He saw so many things at once, that she had suffered, that there were things she couldn't speak of, ever. She had a wounded quality, yet seemed more beautiful... And something else, a fearless air, devoid of faith, restraint; she was a woman who had not yielded."

"He had thought providing for his wife was the greatest expression of devotion. Somehow it hadn't sufficed. How could I have loved her more? I never touched another woman. He didn't care that she had duped him*...His sorrow was this: There was something she had needed, something she had tried to call forth from within him, that he did not possess."
*-By being a rebel favoring Hawaiian queen over US