Rob’s Reviews > This Is Paradise: Stories > Status Update

"Understand your dad was different from the outset. Hand him a beer. After all, to be a boy and to diverge; to watch football but not play it; to keep the books for your grandpa's market instead of unloading the trucks; to leave the island for boarding school; to want to go to college on the mainland; to want to stay there, on the mainland, with only one child to his name, and a girl at that, is to cease to want what men want. Your father is absent from your uncles' stories not because he left, but because he was never of Kaua'i in the first place. Because he was in his own world. Because he is Hawaiian, but no local."