If paradise is the word the brochures use, this audiobook spends six hours and fifty-four minutes taking it apart from the inside. The description sets the terms without hedging: born and raised in Hawaii to a father whose ancestors are indigenous to the land and a mother from the American South, Jessica Machado wrestles with what it means to be local, watching her homeland reflected back at her from the tourist perspective as an uncomplicated paradise while her own existence feels nothing like that. The rest of the paragraph names what fills the running time: a divorce, an ailing mother, growing anxiety, Los Angeles, and a dying mother who follows her daughter to California.
A Trained Voice Chosen Over the Author's Own
For a memoir this interior, the credit line is the first real decision on the record, and it is not the expected one. Machado wrote the book; Mapuana Makia reads it. Memoirs of this kind often arrive in the author's own voice, particularly when the subject is the author's claim on a place, so hearing these sentences in a second voice changes the transaction slightly. It is not a lesser choice. A trained reader can hold six hours of grief steadier than an author working through her own worst year, and Brilliance Audio has plainly gone for a performance over a document. What it does mean is a small gap between the I of the text and the voice delivering it.
Most of the written accounts here are arguing about proportion rather than quality. The response filed under Goth Gone Grey is headed Hawaii first, author second, gives three stars, and declares itself quite ok with those proportions before quoting a passage calling aloha a very real, very powerful thing, a force of love and gratitude. ALLshop, four stars, calls the book raw and heartbreaking and warns that Machado does not shy away from sad, ugly, violent and troubling experiences, or from the tragic treatment of the indigenous Hawaiians. Kindle Customer describes a love letter to a home state, weaving Kanaka mythology and often overlooked elements of Hawaiian history into a coming-of-age story.
A 3.9 Built From a Counter Stuck at One
By any normal reading, the number attached to this record is broken. The badge shows 3.9 and the vote counter shows 1. One whole-star vote produces a whole number; it cannot produce 3.9 under any rounding convention in use anywhere. Underneath that counter sit five graded write-ups carrying a five, a four, a three, a five and a four. So the counter is not simply wrong, it is smaller than the evidence printed directly below it, and the average it advertises has no route through the votes it claims to be counting. Treat the badge as decoration. The five accounts are more useful in any case, and they disagree with each other in productive ways.
Whatever the paperwork says, the reason to spend the six hours is the material. This memoir sits where two things meet that rarely get told together: a private family collapse and a public history of dispossession. The description names the mechanism precisely, a homeland buried under the continental imports of malls and MTV, which works as period detail and as a serious claim about what displaced what. Angie in Montana, writing as someone who spent years in Hawaii as a military brat and reckons to be about seventeen years older than the author, calls Machado a very skilled writer and wants both the history and the happenings since. That double appetite is what the book is built to feed.
Reviews That Predate the Release, and a Missing Subtitle
Between the release date and the responses lies the second oddity. The listing dates the audio to January 1, 2023, and three of the five accounts predate it: December 2, December 3 and December 29, 2022. One of those three names the Prime Free book of the month as the route the book took, and a fourth, filed the day after the release date, opens with a run of jammed-together text containing the words Amazon First Read Selection. So the majority of the feedback here is describing an edition that reached readers before this recording's own date. That does not make their judgments wrong. It does mean nobody writing here is describing Makia. One further gap belongs in the same paragraph: one account calls the book Local, A Memoir, while the title field on this record carries the single word Local and no subtitle whatever, so the thing that tells a browsing listener what kind of book this is has been dropped somewhere between formats.
Every prospective listener should take ALLshop's warning at face value: not for the faint of heart. The same account calls the book truthful and open but also so sad, and for most of its length rather hopeless, while still granting a story well told. That is a fair summary of a memoir about a dying parent and what the publisher's own paragraph calls a reckless downward spiral. The other thing to weigh is proportion, and one response ranks it outright: Hawaii first, author second. If you came for the family story more than for the island, know that at least one reader found the balance tipped and was glad of it.
A Belonging Story That Refuses to Resolve
Neither the vacation-reading crowd nor the pure-history crowd is the target here, though both will find something worth having. This is for listeners who want a first-person account of belonging that refuses to resolve, and who can stay with a narrator who leaves home and does not thereby escape it. Anyone drawn to Hawaiian history gets the language, the culture and what one account calls the brutalization, threaded through a life instead of delivered as a lecture. The five-star entry from lfbensimon praises writing that captures the essence of Hawaiian culture through the journey of a young woman seeking to reconnect with her roots.
Once you accept that the badge means nothing, the decision gets easier. Skip it if you came for an uplifting travel memoir, since the four-star account describes something so sad and for most of the book rather hopeless, and the description ends on a spiral and not a recovery. And should you want an author's own voice for a book about who gets to speak, this is not the edition that provides one; Makia reads it, which for some listeners will be a real if minor loss. Everyone else gets a place written by someone who left it and never stopped arguing with it. The number printed here is broken. The book underneath the number is not.
At a Glance
- Read by: Mapuana Makia reads a memoir its author wrote, six hours and fifty-four minutes delivered in a voice other than the one on the cover
- At its heart: Native Hawaiian identity against a tourist image, a mother's dying, leaving home without escaping it
- Vibe: Unsparing and grief-heavy, with the history carrying much of the weight
- Short version: Machado's reckoning earns its six hours; the numbers bolted to it do not.
