Sorry friends, unfortunately this is not going to be the kind of F grade review where we all get to giggle over an especially prodigious number of tentacles or the shared discovery that shifter Rudolph’s nose is cold and wet in his human form, too. Bound in Flame by Katherine Kayne is grounded in imperialist tropes that are deeply distressing, especially because it is dressed up as a book written to celebrate Hawaii and its culture.
Leticia Liliʻuokalani Lang or Letty is a half-White, half-Native Hawaiian woman with a fiery nature to match her red hair. Also, she’s got flames. Not shooting out of her eyes (which is my dearest wish for my own superpower), but a near constant (but invisible) sensation of flames that lives in her lower back. They tell her to act when there is trouble. Basically, instead of lighting a flame under her butt, her magic is her own personal lodestar that points her in the direction of righteous action and bids her to be courageous.
Letty is 18 years old with her 19th birthday on the horizon. Because of her impetuous nature she has spent the last three years of her life in a boarding school in northern California, learning discipline and diplomacy along with the more standard math and sciences. She loves animals and wants to be a veterinarian despite the fact that in 1906 that would have made her one of the first women with such a degree. Having grown up on a horse farm, she’s also an expert in all things horses and is generally a lover of animals. She also would have been a Hawaiian princess if not for American imperialist actions toppling the Kingdom of Hawaii. As it is, her godmother is Princess Kehokulani, the woman who would have been the Queen of Hawaii.
Her love interest, Lord Timothy Moran Rowley, sucks. Ooops, I mean he’s an Englishman that has sought his fortune in Hawaii because he wasn’t content with the usual life of a younger son. For declaring his desire to be a farmer to his father, he was disowned. Timothy is only a few years older than Letty at 22 years old and walks with a mysterious limp. Letty and Timothy meet upon her return to Hawaii to celebrate her 19th birthday. Aboard the same ship as Timothy’s new horse and groom, she witnesses the attempt to winch the horse from the ship to the dock. Instead of safely getting the horse to dry land, the straps holding the horse snap and he is dropped into the ocean. Blindfolded and hobbled, the horse has little chance of making it to the shore safely, so Letty jumps into the ocean, saving it. Upon making it to shore, Timothy claims the horse and Letty immediately tells him about himself:
“You!” Shoving her body between the man and the stallion, her weakness evaporated. This time anger held her upright. “You don’t deserve this horse. You and your fool groom just nearly got him killed. You are an ass and a moron, and you shall not have him.”
The groom came with the gifted horse and the actual groom was attacked in the street by another guy who stole his identity because he was on the run for killing some people and generally not being a good person.
But Timothy still sucks. When he requests assistance from Princess Kehokulani to help break two colts, she sends Letty, along with another man. Timothy immediately objects to her presence because she is a woman and then when she does an excellent job as promised, his internal voice complains that she was a bit bossy and annoyingly competent. When he’s not being salty about Letty being better at things than he is because she’s being doing them her entire life, he’s openly ogling her body.
But even then, Timothy and all his effortless and uncritical embrace of patriarchal nonsense are not the most frustrating parts of this book. What I could not get past was the handling of Native Hawaiian characters and explanation for why ancient Hawaiian magic has returned.
Basically, this book groups its characters into three different groups: Native Hawaiians, Native Hawaiians like Letty that are hapa (defined in the book as half White and half Native Hawaiian) and White. All Native Hawaiians speak in a pidgin that to my ears/eyes doesn’t seem quite right:
“You no look yet.”
“This right color for you,” Miyako purred. “Princess say green, but this better.”
‘“You some doctor, Miss Letty,” said Freitas, his admiration evident. “I will take care of the rest. Sunflower, she good horse. You some doctor!”
Native Hawaiians that are hapa speak English in the same way that White characters do, except they sometimes throw Hawaiian words in the mix:
“My, my, Pele’s flower, the lehua.”
“In ancient times, we believed it possible to think someone to death with strong intentions, the puleʻanāʻanā.”
“What seemed lost was the power of good intention. Manaʻo pono, righteous thinking.”
My issues with the handling of language are two-fold. First of all, the use of pidgin is highly racialized, which is to say that in this book, to be Native Hawaiian is to speak pidgin. There are no Native Hawaiian characters that speak standard English and there are no hapa Native Hawaiian or White characters that speak pidgin. We never see a hapa Native Hawaiian code switch by speaking one way to White people and speaking another way to Native Hawaiians. I am not Native Hawaiian and definitely not a linguist, but that racialized division between language is one that doesn’t feel realistic. It was jarring to observe the sharp boundaries between the way various characters speak.
Beyond that, the way that the hapa Native Hawaiians spoke didn’t feel naturalistic either. While I am not Native Hawaiian, I am half Mexican-American and have been exposed to the way native speakers combine languages in conversation. I have never heard anyone say, “I am going to my house, la casa.” It’s usually more along the lines of, “That pinche front door! Your brother promised to fix it weeks ago!” or “It’s getting dark in here, prende la luz.” I really struggled with how language was deployed in this novel because it’s clearly oriented to an audience that cannot be trusted to use the appendix or to figure out what a word means from context, which renders conversations stilted.
My real issue here was the central conceit around the resurgence of magic. The old school Hawaiian magic is said to have declined and is now experiencing a resurgence, but only because of the mixing of blood. There is a prophecy which revealed that nine women, the Gates, will guide Hawaii into the future. These nine have the power “because of the mixing of the blood. All the young women we have found with potential are hapa” and have been granted the gift from the land itself.
This trope–requiring a proximity to whiteness to fully understand indigeneity, while also deploying mixed race people as a means through which to claim legitimacy to land and to culture–is part of a pernicious tradition frequently present in the American historical consciousness. Moreover, it is used to justify and erase violent colonial/imperialist acts both in mainland U.S. and in Hawaii and Alaska.
During various periods of American history, intermarriage between Whites and Native Americans was encouraged (or at least those between a White man and a Native American woman!) as a means through which to assimilate and erase the indigenous population, while also granting a legitimate claim to the land. These types of interactions were never about blending European and indigenous culture, but about “civilizing” native populations. The reason why the differences in language between Native Hawaiians, Native Hawaiians that are hapa, and White people is so concerning to me is because it makes visible this belief in the way the characters speak. Hapa Native Hawaiians have become civilized, speaking like the White characters, while Native Hawaiians are left speaking pidgin. Hapa Native Hawaiians never speak pidgin, as if once accessing whiteness, they’ve crossed a boundary they can never return to.
The relationship between Letty and Timothy is one that is focused on Timothy and his journey towards legitimizing his claim to kinship with the Hawaiian culture and land through both his ownership of land and his relationship with Letty and her magic. Ultimately it is Timothy and not Letty that learns how to fully control her magic so that they can have a physical relationship. After learning that Princess Kehokulani cannot have a physical relationship with the man that she loves and experiencing first hand why when kissing Letty, Timothy searches for a solution. He finds one in the midst of a bender after returning to London to deal with some family issues. Timothy meets a blue-eyed Indian (South Asian) man named Sir John Woodruffe who claims to be a master of esoterica. Timothy brings his newfound knowledge back to Letty, who had already decided that being in a relationship was impossible. He insists that he knows better than her about the magic that lives within her body and the lost history of her own culture. And, once they have sex, Timothy feels like he is a true Hawaiian and they return to Hawaii an as engaged couple.
A narrative that asserts that magic can only return through the creation of hapa Native Hawaiians and through White intercession does an incredible amount of work to excuse White imperialist actions because it asserts that without the conquering and annexation of the islands, Hawaiians would have never regained their magical connection to the land. I had truly hoped to read a story that introduced me to a fun spin on romantic fantasy tropes within the framework of a culture I had little exposure to, a heroine who was strong and clever, and a hero that I did not want to punch in the face. Unfortunately for me, Bound in Flame was a fairly insensitive and ignorant recitation of imperialist apologia that never seemed to realize that, while it claimed to be about Native Hawaiian culture, all it was really about was centering Whiteness.
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I am a linguist, albeit not a sociolinguist, and you are absolutely right about all of the linguistic details, Maya. It’s completely unrealistic for all the Native Hawai’ians to be speaking pidgin while all the hapas speak standard English. Some individuals might have that pattern, sure, but everyone? No way! That would be unrealistic even in the first generation of contact (if nothing else, children are really good at learning additional languages, so many of them would have spoken both Pidgin and standard English; and plenty of adults learn to speak a new language fluently, it’s just much harder), let alone by 1906. Everything should have been much more fluid than this, just as you suggest.
The trope where the hero knows how the heroine’s body works better than she does pisses me off whenever and wherever it comes up, but add in the bonus racism/imperialism and the fact that it’s her entire culture in addition to her body and her magic that he Knows Better About and… I can’t even.
It amazes and disgusts me that stuff like this is still published, urgh. But thank you for the analysis Maya.
I just DNF’d a book with a half-Pacific Islander heroine for less egregious representation problems than this. Thank you for the thorough review.
Oh, she was only sent to boarding school because she was headstrong.
Dear author: boarding school was a place of genocide and torture. So many people never came home and those who did were traumatized. And that particular practice didnt stop until the 1960s to 80s.
You wanted someone who had been “finished” and so you said “she went to boarding school. Now shes a good hapa.”
Oh screw you. Boarding schools are hell for any Indigenous person and community. And you sent her there to be finished/remade by White people.
(I have a lot of other feelings from this review, but I’m running short on sleep.)
…okay, for my own mental stability: thank you Maya, I was furious at the book author and appreciative of your review.
(I’m mixed Native/White and have a lot of foul words on the assimilation that led to my generation and boarding schools are a massive trigger for anyone post the early 1800s at max, so for her to go off to school to be more White, infuriated me.)
@Maya, can I just say on your behalf: AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
So much fury here — HE magically finds the “cure” to fucking “fix” her???????????????????????????????????????????
Thank you for this excellent critique. This book sounds infuriating!
I had this preordered and am so grateful for this review because if I’d stumbled into this content without a warning it would have been devastating. Just secondhand reading about it gutted me. Thank you for saving me from making a huge mistake.
This is all kinds of yikes. Definitely avoiding this book.
Sweet God, this is the fourth historical romance I’ve read that was released in the ’10s in which non-white characters speak in pidgin. Stop DOING this, authors!
Also yes, that’s my experience living in a household with trilingual grandparents, Maya.
And that is one racist central plot conceit. And WTF is that racist plot solution?!
I’m kind of amazed this was published, to be honest.
* Heard of, not read. I actually did read the other three I’m referencing above.
And none of them spoke Hawaiian?
Thanks @Kr for pointing out why being sent to boarding school for an indigenous woman means something completely different than for a white woman. It’s amazing/devastating how a throwaway biographical detail can unwittingly contain a whole universe of pain, suffering, and oppression.
And thanks @Star and @LisaF for the linguistic confirmations!
@Lori, it’s not clear who is fully fluent in Hawaiian. No character really engages with that language in a way that reveals fluency.
Wait, so if you have sex with someone from a culture, you get to claim that culture? If you have sex with people from 10 different cultures, do you get to claim all of them? Does this only work for white men, or can anyone do it?
WOW. So basically sex with a woman of partial Native Hawaiian ancestry – but only partial – legitimizes colonization? SMDH.
I’d been refraining from commenting on the “Pidgin” examples themselves because I’m not familiar with Hawawi’ian Pidgin and because this isn’t my subfield, but… this has just really been bothering me.
Maya, when you say that the Pidgin examples don’t look right, I agree. The thing about pidgins is that they’re a sort of inter-language that people from different linguistic backgrounds develop when they don’t have a common language, which means that there ought to be words that are unique to the Pidgin, words taken from each contributing language but maybe with some changes in meaning, that sort of thing. Pidgins are an actual communication system, not quite a full language per se but still to some extent standardised. These examples just look like what a monolingual English speaker thinks people sound like when they don’t speak English fluently, and that’s not what a pidgin is.
This was bothering me so much that I did some poking around and… well, let’s just let the second paragraph of Wikipedia’s article on Hawai’ian Pidgin speak for itself, shall we:
Despite its name, Hawaiian Pidgin is not a pidgin, but rather a full-fledged, nativized, and demographically stable creole language. It did, however, evolve from various real pidgins spoken as common languages between ethnic groups in Hawaiʻi.
It is A CREOLE. And creoles are NOT PIDGINS. They are ACTUAL LANGUAGES with their own grammars, rules, vocabularies, all of it! (The article later goes on to say that most linguists consider it a creole but others (including locals) consider it a dialect; this is largely an argument about semantics, and dialects are varieties of languages and therefore: also actual languages.) And Hawai’ian Pidgin in particular has influences from MANY other input languages, not just English and not even just Hawai’ian and English, so it should NOT sound like those examples.
So in other words: Maya, your instincts are excellent, and this is all even more egregious than it looks initially, and that was already pretty bad.
Those quoted pidgin bits read like someone’s watched Hawaii50 and patterned all the Hawai’ian Pidgin on Kamekona’s dialogue.
A red-haired half-native woman and a blue-eyed Asian Indian? Gosh. Someone needs to hit the author over the head with, say, the first chapter of K J Charles’s The Henchmen of Zenda, which has much to say about the original Zenda’s weird notions about the heritability of red hair.
One of the admirable aspects of the splendidly cheesy classic novel Ramona is that all the Mexican and/or Native characters speak very formal, elegant, archaic English. Only the white characters speak “dialect”.
Well, this sounds like a wallbanger. In the “dented the wall when I threw this horrid book at it” fashion, not “sexytime lulz a la Alice Clayton”.