Interwoven throughout with the indelible portrait of a native Hawaiian family struggling against poverty, drug wars, and the increasing military occupation of their sacred lands.
KIRKUS REVIEW
Yet he is dedicated to recording the ecological horrors in his motherland and across the Pacific. With stunning narrative inventiveness, Davenport has created a timeless epic of loss and remembrance, of the search for family and identity, and, ultimately, of the redemptive power of love. Paperback , pages. Published June 26th by Ballantine Books first published To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
To ask other readers questions about House of Many Gods , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Nov 01, Brendon rated it really liked it Shelves: See original review here: Kiana Davenport is biracial, Native Hawaiian and White. Her father came to the islands when he was stationed at Pearl Harbor an See original review here: As a biracial reader and writer, I look forward to reading biracial and multiracial authors and how their characters may have to navigate two different cultures or how they are perceived in different communities.
In addition, this month I aim to feature Native Hawaiian authors and their works in an efforts for more visibility. Kiana Davenport is able to weave many themes within House of Many Gods. While the book is described as a love story, I honestly did not think or experience it as a romantic love story the way I would expect to… And that was fantastic for me as a reader. Ana is a particularly driven and intelligent person and goes to school to ultimately become a physician. A love story begins between two very stubborn and headstrong people from vastly different cultures.
After finishing the novel, I thought the main themes were family, health and ability, and environmental justice, more so than romance. It impacts how she relates to her extended family, her friends, and her romantic partners. However, there is a twist when Ana has medical complications when she is a resident in the emergency room.
Her struggle through her medical issues were also powerful and tied directly to the themes of family and friends. Both of these themes I would love to talk about more, but I feel like I would be spoiling the book for all of you. I will let you discover this for yourselves. Environmental justice was a huge backdrop for the story. I appreciate the subtle and direct messages about modern day colonialism of sacred Native Hawaiian land in the name of security and defense by the United States government.
Remembering that Hawaii was a strategic military base and port, it is not surprising about the further taking of land from Native Peoples to test bombs and missiles. When Nikolai was first introduced and made his way to Hawaii, I was afraid his story line would be a White Savior narrative. Either his part in the struggle for environmental justice or the love story between him and Ana would result in a perfectly happy ending. And the credit would go to Nikolai. I was pleasantly surprised that Nikolai, even with his own chapters to described his history in Russia, remained a minor character and did not sweep in at the end to save the day.
In fact, he respected Ana and simply listened to what she wanted… and left Hawaii. Without going into too many spoilers for this book, I found their relationship at the end of the book to be less about saving one person or another but saving each other from all of the painful experiences of their individual lives. This allowed separation from the White Savior narrative and turned it into one of common understanding and common goals.
The culture infused in this novel is absolutely astounding.
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First of all, the book is filled with many Hawaiian words which are italicized in this case and I believe there was a glossary in the back to help non-Native Hawaiian speaking people to better describe situations, traditions, food, feelings, and beliefs better than any English word could. I am not a big proponent in italicizing non-English words, but I do not mind if an OwnVoices author chooses to for their own reasons. The glossary is helpful; however, I enjoyed feeling the words in the context of the passage.
I may not know what the words mean exactly, but the words immersed me in the story. The number of traditions included also added to the experience. From coming of age traditions to pregnancy traditions, the authentic OwnVoices writing by Kian Davenport made House of Many Gods unapologetically Hawaiian, away from the paradise and resort narrative. This is one of those books where I felt like I knew Ana from a child all the way to and through adulthood.
The writing in the book has a way at progressing the characters little by little so when I stopped to finally reflect, I realized how much these characters actually changed. It was similar to watching a TV show over ten seasons and looking back at the characters in season one and being awestruck at the development and change in them.
Brilliant writing, seriously, to be able to achieve this feeling. If you can find a copy, I would recommend you pick it up!
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Oct 19, Katie rated it really liked it Shelves: Dec 09, Margaret Higgins rated it really liked it Shelves: Kiana Davenport's book House of Many Gods is a wonderful generational novel, beginning in the mid-Sixties and running to present day, along the Waianae coast of Oahu, a neighborhood largely unknown to the outside world. It houses the third-largest homeless population in the United States, made up of mostly ghettoized native Hawaiians. In this novel, set in a house shared by many and various mothers, their children and the occasional father, a story about a young girl takes place.
Abandoned by he Kiana Davenport's book House of Many Gods is a wonderful generational novel, beginning in the mid-Sixties and running to present day, along the Waianae coast of Oahu, a neighborhood largely unknown to the outside world. Abandoned by her mother, she struggles within a culture clash within the only home she's ever known, her expectations, the outside world, and how to love. During the book she finds a way through much of the tragedy and poverty around her to become a doctor, eventually connect the pieces of her life, and travels halfway around the world to rescue a man, also struggling in his native culture, that she'd refused to love.
At least as important as the story she tells, Kiana's descriptions and narrative, as lush and rich as a tropical rainforest, brings along the deep abiding spiritualism of a Hawaiian spirit subjugated by a profusion of foreign influences, from the missionaries to the more recent intrusions of Asian, and most of all, the United States, influences. This will be a read you cannot put down and will never forget. Jul 03, Erin rated it it was amazing. Kiana Davenport is at her best when describing the world of Hawaii's native people, and she does it well here.
Touched with lyricism and the language of a people unknown to many of us, this novel rings with truth and leaves the sadness and mystery of a real life in its wake. Ana is raised in her extended family's home and yearns for her absent mother. Redemption, forgiveness, and acceptance must all be taught at a hard price to Ana and her mother in this novel.
At times I wanted to shake Ana; th Kiana Davenport is at her best when describing the world of Hawaii's native people, and she does it well here. At times I wanted to shake Ana; the mark of a great story-teller. This is also, of course, a love story, though I found Ana and Nikolai's time together sort of a side note, really, and Nikolai himself to be strangely paper-like. As if his experiences in Russia were a strange afterthought.
I would have liked to have seen more of Ana's mother's story, instead. It is the story of a mother and daughter and the choices that they make that really resonates here, how we can hurt the innocent with seemingly innocent choices, and how anger serves no one. Wound throughout are gorgeous descriptions of an island and a people who are struggling to find their place in the world around them, told with an insider's tongue and knowledge.
Beautiful and deceptively simple, this novel will leave you wanting to book a trip to Hawaii and call your mama at the same time. Jan 25, Christie Bane rated it it was amazing. This was a beautifully written book that gave me what I wanted from my Hawai'i reading list -- a better understanding of the REAL Hawai'i, away from Honolulu and Waikiki.
Ana is a native Hawai'ian born in a village far up the coast from Honolulu. She grows up there with her large extended family, lots of them damaged physically and psychologically by the Vietnam War. The valley where she comes from is full of problems -- gangs, drugs, violence -- and she is deserted by her mother and raised by h This was a beautifully written book that gave me what I wanted from my Hawai'i reading list -- a better understanding of the REAL Hawai'i, away from Honolulu and Waikiki.
The valley where she comes from is full of problems -- gangs, drugs, violence -- and she is deserted by her mother and raised by her family but she manages to become a doctor.
Kiana Davenport
Still, she never has any desire to leave her family, no matter how messed up they are. She meets and becomes the lover of a Russian named Niki, a guy whose childhood makes hers look like The Brady Bunch.
Nothing is as horrible as Russia in this book. A whole land full of starving, freezing people? A wife with cancer who Niki has to help to die by freezing her in the snow? A restaurant with a mummified, dead human in the corner? I do not ever want to go to Russia, no thank you. Niki becomes a documentary film maker focusing on the evils of pollution. He meets Ana after a hurricane in the Hawai'ian islands. Their story becomes the next chapter in the story of this book. I loved it and it was a great escape from the terrible Michigan winter. Dec 18, Joy rated it really liked it.
A really good read. So chock full of details you knew the author had to be a native Hawaiian. I have been there several times and got hints of the culture there, but this book gave the reader a deep dive into the familial relationships inherent in Hawaiian culture. Oddly, I found most of the secondary characters to be more fleshed out and interesting than the main character, which made the book feel like an autobiography by a person who wasn't as self aware as much as being a good observer and c A really good read.
Oddly, I found most of the secondary characters to be more fleshed out and interesting than the main character, which made the book feel like an autobiography by a person who wasn't as self aware as much as being a good observer and chronicler of their community. Great dive into Russian culture too! My favorite observation was that Russians don't adapt. The military was forced to halt while environmental impact studies were conducted.
Our soil and waters are full of toxins and radioactive fallout. Our people are ill with respiratory diseases, cancer, leukemia. Both Ana and Niki endure their share of suffering: Is it the sine qua non of our being? There are several answers to that question. In late-night conversations over vodka, each man talked about his years spent in the gulags, the Russian slave labor camps in the s.
HOUSE OF MANY GODS by Kiana Davenport | Kirkus Reviews
Describing that bestial existence, Boris felt he had been stripped of his humanity, that part of him was dead forever. He was one of those expansive Russians who seem to embody all the drama and chaos of his country. Now I love life. I cherish every moment, every detail! How it shapes us depends on the individual. It has given him his humanity.
How did you arrive at this hopeful ending? Originally the book had a very bleak ending. It was rational and logical, I thought. But unlike a lot of modern writers, I am not a cool, detached and rational author. I believe in passion, deep passion, in life and in writing. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. So, after about twenty drafts, I realized that this couple, Ana and Nikolai, had suffered enough.
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Both orphans in a way, they had overcome amazing odds, they had achieved important things. I felt that these two people, whom I loved, had earned their right to be happy. Though I sensed I was coming to the end of something when completing House of Many Gods, it was only in retrospect that I saw what you refer to as the arc of Hawaiian history, beginning with our last monarch and ending near the present. Of course, there are still thousands of stories to tell. Which one of those thousands will you choose next? My father, Braxton Bragg Davenport, was a U.
His ancestor was a one-armed cavalier who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. All paths lead home? Beginning in , the novel focuses on Ana Kapakahi, a young girl from the poor coastal village Nanakuli, who is being raised by her extended family, her mother having departed for the mainland and a better life. Many of the elders in her family and neighborhood adhere to the old spiritual and cultural traditions, and they resent the fact that much of the land in these mountains has been seized by the US military, ending the Hawaiians' traditional use of the land and despoiling their sacred burial places and shrines.
Traditional holy sites have been bombed, large areas have been blocked by fencing, and ammunition has been stored on virgin land, the resulting pollution from chemicals and unexploded ordinance despoiling the streams and swimming holes. Davenport traces the life of the resilient Ana, from to the present, as she copes with poverty, few opportunities, and inferior schooling, contrasting it with the life of her mother, Anahola also called Ana , who is living comfortably on the mainland.
She also introduces a new plot element by comparing and contrasting Ana's life with that of Nikolai Volenko, a young child living in the northernmost city in Russia, Archangelsk, to which his father was exiled for "two careless words. Ana's progress from childhood, through school, college, and medical school, a journey of immense hardship and stress, illustrates her resilience and indomitable will. Her long-standing resentment of her mother for abandoning her never flags, and she refuses to have anything to do with her, blaming her for many of the difficulties she has with relationships, a focus of much of the novel.
Nikolai, too, manages to receive schooling, becoming a mathematician, but he drops out, eventually becoming a videographer. The two come together when Hurricane Iniki destroys the Hawaiian island of Kauai and Ana, as a physician, responds to the calls for help, while Niki, on a one-year fellowship to study in the US, arrives to record the events for a video documentary.
Though the author might have used her plot to set up simple love stories in which the cultural differences among various lovers complicate their lives, Davenport goes much further than that. All the love stories--of Anahola Ana's mother , Niki and a trapeze artist in Russia, and Ana and Niki--are complicated by the effects of the polluted environments in which the characters have lived, and the author minces no words in describing the physical effects and assigning blame for them.