Hammajang Luck
Makano Yamamoto
Trade Paperback / eBook
ISBN:9780063430822
Harper Voyager, January 14 2025, 368 pgs

Hammajang is a Hawaiian pidgin word that means chaos, disorder, or disarray. It’s also a great way to describe the life of Edie Morikawa. Being non-binary and trans fit naturally into the past order of traditional Hawaiian culture. After climate change and corporate profiteering forced most islanders to relocate to the Kepler space station, gender is a slightly more complicated affair, but Hawaiian pride still runs strong. So do the cycles of generational poverty inherited from the homeworld, leading Edie and their childhood best friend Angel to even the social scores a bit, becoming accomplished thieves and con artists while developing an epic will-they-or-won’t-they-romance. Everything is fun and games until Angel betrays Edie and watches them serve an eight-year prison sentence while she shifts to the straight and narrow path, navigating it so well that she becomes one of the highest-paid confidantes of one of Kepler’s richest men. She’s so powerful that she arranges for Edie’s early release, but not out of the goodness of her heart—it’s for a job bigger and more challenging than anything prison-hardened Edie could ever imagine.

Often, books that feature casts of multicultural, queer, and trans characters spend quite a lot of time reckoning with identity and discrimination (and to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that). This book takes a different tack—nobody’s identity is targeted or even all that remarkable in the context of the story, focusing instead on pure fun and cool future tech. The result is a quick-paced caper, complete with a carefully selected crew of specialists with big personalities, an impossibly difficult job, a rich jerk who deserves to get ripped off, and big scary consequences if the specialists fail. But of course, they’re not going to fail—that’s the point of a story like these. We’re hanging on to see just how they manage to win, and in that regard, Hammajang Luck pays off spectacularly. Character competence is an underrated literary joy, and there’s a lot of it in the solutions the Hammajang crew come up with for their assorted space caper problems. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any twists, because there are a few spectacular ones. But the pacing is so good and the people so engaging that you’re lulled into not expecting them.

The story is great but it’s the characters who really carry it. They feel like a real family, both of blood and of choice, bouncing off of each other perfectly and never falling flat. The dialogue in this book is laugh-out-loud funny at times, but brings the drama when needed. It’s helped by the fact that Hawaiian pidgin is sprinkled throughout the book. If you’re not familiar with the language (I wasn’t) you might have to look up a few words, but it all adds to the fun and family feel. While nobody is overtly marginalized for their queerness in the context of the story, queer relationships and social dynamics play a very big part in the story and the way that the characters interact.

It’s a space heist firmly grounded in real Hawaiian culture, with a cast of characters made up of fully embodied queer and multicultural Hawaiian people. If that sounds interesting to you, there’s nothing else to tell you but to enjoy this book.