Publication Date June 21, 2022
A good story in a great setting that will draw in readers.—Kirkus Reviews
With the publication of "Hawai'i Calls", novelist, Marjorie Nelson Matthews clearly demonstrates her genuine flair for originality and a narrative storytelling style that keeps her readers full attention from first page to last. This is all the more impressive when considering that "Hawai'i Calls" is her first published novel. An impressively entertaining work of fiction, "Hawai'i Calls" is fully and unreservedly recommended for community library collections.—Small Press Bookwatch
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When Marjorie’s paternal grandmother Zaida Male died in 1987, her scrapbooks and many of her photographs were passed along to Marjorie. Her scrapbooks contain columns she wrote for Sodus, New York’s The Record and The Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The former pieces chronicle her family’s voyage from New York to Honolulu as well as her first impressions of her new home. Her columns for The Honolulu Star-Bulletin cover Honolulu’s glamorous social scene in the latter part of the 1930s. Reading those columns inspired Marjorie to create a novel loosely based on the narrative of Zaida’s life. Though her grandmother inspired the novel, the characters and storyline that developed in the course of writing Hawai‘i Calls are completely fictional. The photographs below, taken from Zaida’s collection, offer a glimpse of the novel’s settings.
Novel’s Synopsis
At age thirty-six, Sadira Doyle believes the best years of her life are behind her. A housewife and mother in a parochial town during the latter years of the depression, she yearns for more. Her husband, once a golden boy, is an alcoholic sinking into despair, her eldest son’s eccentricities make him the object of bullying, and her mother-in-law’s religious zeal runs counter to Sadira’s own spiritual sensibilities. The weekly radio show, Hawai‘i Calls, offers Sadira escape from a bleak world. When her husband Archie loses his job, Sadira decides they will begin anew in Hawai‘i. Archie and Sadira set forth from New York City with their two young sons, bound for a place where they know no one. The voyage itself stretches Sadira, introducing her to people and lifestyles well outside the norms of her life experience.
A new job in Honolulu doesn’t transform Archie and the move exacerbates their son Lionel’s emotional struggles, but Sadira discovers new possibilities for herself. She secures a job as the society columnist for a Honolulu daily and finds herself in the company of movie stars, politicians, and Honolulu’s most powerful players. This intoxicating, glamorous world soon proves challenging and flawed. The Japanese attack on Oahu changes the landscape once again, altering daily life for the islands and for Sadira. Hawai‘i’s glory days as playground to the stars are over, the island’s serenity shattered. Sadira must recreate herself once more if she and her family are to survive.
