Father

Readers devoted to Yamanaka's Hawaiian trilogy (Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers; Blu's Hanging; Heads by Harry) will be pleased with her fourth novel, an uncompromising story of the tenaciousness of motherly love amid the chaos of drugs and dysfunction. In urgent, virtuosic prose, Yamanaka introduces a fierce, often wayward protagonist, Sonia Kurisu, who trips back and forth from past to present in her first-person narrative, evoking her nightmarish childhood punctuated by visions of God and the devil. Her unstable mother, Grace, abandons Sonia and Sonia's older sister, Celeste, to the care of their grandmother, while their wandering, koan-spouting father's attempts at communication only further distance him from his daughters. In an attempt to escape her troublesome and troubled family, Sonia leaves Hawaii for Las Vegas, struggling to finish college and raise her son, Sonny Boy. But she can't seem to pull herself together: she is haunted by the memory of the three children she aborted in Hawaii, all of whom begin to clamor for her attention in voices and visions. When Sonny Boy is diagnosed as autistic at age two, Sonia first overdoses on drugs, then returns home to Hawaii, where her journey toward reconciliation and recovery begins. Harsher than ever in its unflinching depiction of stifled rage and twisted love, and charged with a fervid yet earthy mysticism, this is Yamanaka's most challenging work to date. Suffused with pathos, but never overwhelmed by sentiment, the novel settles itself deep into the rhythms and passions of its protagonists. (Jan.)