Product Description

From the acclaimed author of Snow Mountain Passage comes this richly evocative novel that follows a half-Indian, half-Hawai'ian woman and her complex relationship with the last king of Hawai'i.

When talk show host Sheridan Brody finds the journals of his great grandmother Nani Keala (aka Nancy Callahan), he uncovers a mythic, unknown tale. Nani, a shy girl from a remote Indian village, met the Hawai'ian king, David Kalakaua, on his grand progress by train across the United States in 1881, eventually returning with him to Honolulu. There, as his young ally and protégée, ever more assured and charming, she played an integral role in his attempt to revive the monarchy and spirit of his people and, eventually, witnessed the mysterious circumstances surrounding his downfall. Deeply engaging through its vivid portrayal of California and Hawai'i at the end of the nineteenth century, Bird of Another Heaven is a masterful portrait of an era long past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #496777 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Released on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
After his fictional treatment of the Donner Party (Snow Mountain Passage), Houston's superb ninth novel details the life of Sheridan "Dan" Brody, a young Northern California radio host intent on discovering the origins of his shrouded family heritage. Dan's curiosity is sparked after seeing, for the first time, his birth certificate, which lists the name of a father he never knew. Not long after, Rosa Wadell calls Dan's radio show and reveals herself to be the grandmother he never knew about. Through Rosa's stories and her mother's diaries, a clearer picture of Dan's family history emerges. Houston interweaves Dan's life in mid-1980s San Francisco with the Hawaiian tribal legacy of his great-grandmother, Nani Keala ("Nancy Callahan"), a pioneer who learned the Hawaiian ways of life and took her place at the side of Hawaii's last king, David Kalakaua. The two story lines converge as Dan learns of and begins to hunt for a secret audio recording made at San Francisco's Palace Hotel during King Kalakaua's final days. Though it gets off to a slow start, Houston builds momentum as the novel's scope widens, and the historical detail is mesmerizing. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by David Treuer

James Houston's fascinating historical romance Bird of Another Heaven doesn't soar so much as burrow into the lives of the last king of Hawaii, David Kalakaua; his half-Hawaiian, half-Indian consort, Nani Keala (aka Nancy Callahan); and Dan Brody, Nani Keala's great-grandson. The story is split between the past and present and tied together neatly by the search for a wax cylinder with Kalakaua's last words on it.

The story is told by Dan Brody, a Bay Area radio host who discovers that the name of the father listed on his birth certificate is not the name of the man who raised him. Shortly after this discovery (too shortly), a woman named Rosa Wadell calls in to Dan's radio program, and, true to her role as sage, trickster and grandmother, she teases Dan into a search for his origins. She feeds him reminiscences of and written journals by his great-grandmother, Nani Keala, a fascinatingly chaste hula dancer, teacher, writer, chronicler of time lost and, most important, the sometimes lover of the dashing David Kalakaua.

Dan's present predicament involves his job at an independent radio station threatened by corporate machinations, but we also are introduced to the larger-than-life personalities of David Kalakaua ("The Merrie Monarch"), John A. Sutter (of Sutter's Mill fame) and other frontier characters as well as to traditions of the past -- hula dancing, California exploration, the Gold Rush and life for California Indians at missions and rancherias.

Houston is the author of Snow Mountain Passage, a historical novel about the ill-fated Donner Party, and with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, of Farewell to Manzanar, based on her family's experiences at a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Obviously the result of painstaking and passionate research, the sections here on early California settlement, belle époque San Francisco, Hawaiian court intrigue, the life of mixed-blood Indians in California who experienced the quick and sometimes thorough extermination of age-old cultures are all completely and passionately told.

But facts don't a novel make, imagination does; and this is where Bird of Another Heaven stumbles. The author needs to rise to the fictional challenge precisely when the historical facts peter out. Instead, Houston's novel falls into a great pondering. For instance, just when Nani Keala and the Merrie Monarch are about to have sex for the first time, the story dissolves into a string of questions: "As Nani mounted the steps, what was she thinking, at age nineteen? What was she expecting? We can only guess. Had she asked the horseman where they were going? In this time of high festivity, would she be listening for voices, for the strumming of guitars? When she stepped through the open doorway, did she expect to see the king standing across the wide front room?"

One cannot fault Houston for refusing to sexualize Nani. Hawaiian and Native women have been used to that end for centuries, and it is difficult not to fall into shallow, offensive characterizations based on sexual availability. But Houston's reluctance -- to violate the past, to make his characters sweat -- spills over into the modern parts of his tale, too, and infects the whole of the novel. The book becomes too easy. Struggle yields communion, ancient tribal knowledge produces wisdom, searches unearth treasures, and every need finds its fulfillment. Take this encounter between Dan and his producer, the lovely Julie: "We came straight up to my place and gave ourselves to an exquisite desire. In times past our unions had been wild and bawdy. This was different. This time was new. She had never been so pliant, so generous. We wept. We laughed like children." Indeed.

The novel itself is pliant and generous to a fault, feeding whatever hunger the main characters might have. There is no sense that struggle leads to more struggle or that the characters might at any time be shielded from, even ignorant of, their own motivations or desires. The result is a story that is too tender and pure to be toothsome, filled with modern sentiments and sensitivities rather than those of the actual past. And since none of the characters acts without knowing why, the story stalls, and the only recourse is the chance encounter, the timely coincidence. Just when Dan needs to know more, his saintly grandmother "finds" more journals literally hidden under the bed, or he suddenly remembers a friend who runs a museum in Honolulu.

Houston has given us the story of a lifetime, filled with characters who are posed, not animated. Without an author willing to break the bones of historical fact to extract the marrow, all we are left holding in our hands is a soulfully and sensitively produced diagram of those bones, not a story that contains their true meaning.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* This carefully developed novel, which pulls readers inexorably into its rich recesses, rests on a theme not uncommon in contemporary fiction: the rather primal urge to know our personal heritage, to understand our forebears as individuals. The specific symbol of that pursuit, in this case, is a royal artifact from the collapsing years of the Hawaiian kingdom before its annexation by the U.S. Like a bolt from the blue, a San Francisco-area radio-show host receives a call from a woman insisting she is his grandmother. Primarily through a multivolume diary kept by her mother, two worlds, two cultures open up to his astonished and absorbent awareness: the final years of the reign of Hawaiian king David Kalakau and a California Indian tribe's shrinking as the nineteenth century comes to a close. Houston, author of, among other well-received novels, Snow Mountain Passage (2001), uses a technique currently popular in historical fiction: alternating his narrative between a past and present period of time, which serves a twofold purpose--not only ushering readers into a vivid visitation to the past but also drawing meaningful parallels between historical and present-day events, to gain for his readers an appreciation of the past's influence on choices individuals make these days. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

powerful character study
In 1980s Northern California radio host Sheridan "Dan" Brody has always wondered about his roots, but did nothing to learn more about the identity of his father. However, when he sees his birth certificate, it includes the name of his sire. He wants to know more about his paternal side.

Not long afterward, Rosa Waddell calls Dan while he is on the air to inform him she is his grandmother. He goes to meet her and she shares family stories and her mother's diaries that tell quite a heritage. His great-grandmother was Nani Keala who was the wife of Hawaii's last king, David Kalakaua. Now Dan seeks an audio of his ancestor's regal trip to the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

BIRD OF ANOTHER HEAVEN is a delightful tale of a San Franciscan seeking his roots. Once Rosa contacts Dan, the story line becomes one sitting throughout as readers will want to more about his Hawaiian ancestry and that missing tape. This it behooves fans of remarkable family dramas to give this fine novel a chance; once Dan gets started there is no turning back for him or the audience. James D. Houston provides a powerful character study of a soul searching person looking for his unknown heritage.

Harriet Klausner

A young man seeks his roots; discovers the small is ever swallowed by the big
Moving between his narrator's view in 1980s San Francisco and the narrator's great-grandmother's story a century earlier, Houston reels out a soulful tale of ruthless conquest and dying cultures in the context of a young man's search for roots and meaning.

Alternative-radio talk show host Sheridan Brody never knew his biological father. Sheridan Wadell died in the Korean War and his son was brought up by as good a stepfather as a boy could ask for. But when a woman claiming to be Sheridan's grandmother, Rosa Wadell, calls in to his radio show, he can't help but be intrigued.

In addition to pictures and stories of his dead father, Rosa has stacks of notebooks belonging to her mother, Nani Keala, a half Indian, half Hawaiian woman who was a friend and lover to the last king of Hawaii, David Kalakaua. She was a witness to the last days of her mother's tribal culture and her father's Hawaiian nation. She was with Kalakaua when he died in San Francisco and was always suspicious of the circumstances.

Nani was born in one of California's last Indian villages. The place slowly disappeared as elders died and young people moved off to find work and when Nani's parents died she was sent to a rancheria where Indian ways were preserved on a white man's estate.

There Nani lives a dutiful life, helping out in the Mistress' school, agreeing to marry a man she doesn't love. But then a Hawaiian kinsman comes to fetch her to see their king when he visits Sacramento. Her notebook entries are brief, stilted, even shy, but Sheridan fleshes them out with his own research and eager imaginings.

He recreates Nani's father's life, from his days exploring and establishing an outpost in the wilderness with Capt. John Sutter, through the gold rush, and his adoption into his wife's tribe. His exile from Hawaii remains to be explained and becomes part of the fabric of American conquest as the story goes on.

Sheridan imagines how Nani captivates the king with her mixed heritage, her quick mind, her languages. And her beauty, of course. She accompanies him to Hawaii where his extravagant coronation sparks the wrath of the white merchant community who see him as a wastrel. But Kalakaua's aim is to appear as a king among kings, to make his people proud of their island nation, now so encroached upon by the whites.

Houston weaves the history seamlessly into his narrative, illustrating to the reader how European and American greed and self-righteousness informed the times. The U.S. wants a Pacific port, Pearl Harbor, and pressures the king, exasperated by his resistance.

"Peabody's smile was almost derisive. He held degrees from Columbia and Yale. He had practiced in New York and in San Francisco. He saw himself as the voice of right reason and common sense."

"'What am I to do with such a man,'" the king says when Peabody is gone. "'He was born here and his father too. Yet their loyalty is not to me. It is to a roomful of senators six thousand miles away.'"

Nani becomes witness to the demise of her Indian and Hawaiian culture; her great grandson does not even know he has Indian or Hawaiian blood until he's told as an adult and he regards it as something exotic and romantic. This idealization never quite goes away, even when he becomes immersed in the history.

Inspired by the notebooks, the great-grandmother Sheridan envisions is a young man's creation. She is myth embodied, almost a saint. She owns an abundance of love, and is alive to everything, with a rich sexuality and a deeper modesty. Truly a young man's ideal.

His girlfriend, smart beautiful - but with a young son - is not quite so simple an icon.

Houston's writing is beautiful; his word-pictures are mesmerizing. The narrative has a hypnotic effect, fed by the mythical frame of it, the slow inevitable decline for the two halves of Nani's heritage.

In addition, in Sheridan's present, he too fights for cultural survival as his small radio station is swallowed by a conglomerate that will no longer be happy with niche markets. Not on the same scale as swallowing a culture perhaps, but emphasizing, nonetheless, that might and self-righteousness always wins in the end.

A lovely, moving word picture, though maybe a tad too long.

Historical fiction with plenty of soul
It's a captivating story, but even more rewarding to the reader is the exploration of values of the major characters.