Raised in Hawaii.
Bibliophile.
Adventurer.
Writer.
Sugar Junky.
By day, I’m a business writer doing über cool stuff like writing press releases, ad copy, business plans and magazine articles. And I’m a mom, doing mom things.
But by night, I’m a novelist/poet/essayist that enjoys slipping into writing time warps and surfacing hours later.
GONE DARK tells the story of Sam, a haole (foreigner/white) teenage girl who feels trapped in small town Hawaii. Sam’s mother, Carol, a seemingly selfless woman with a compulsion to fix wounded animals, has committed to rehabilitate an affable, lifelong methamphetamine addict named Brandon. Unbeknownst to Sam, her mother has been carefully hiding from a dangerous past for over a decade, a betrayal that will undermine everything Sam knows about her own life. When Carol’s past finds her, she must choose to confront her fears or follow her instinct to run, with the fate of a broken man, and the relationship with her daughter, hanging in the balance.
Told from multiple perspectives, each character lends a faceted picture of addiction, life in the islands of Hawaii, the notion of home and the power of fear. The setting in Hawaii is, in itself, a dominant character in the story, with the rich use of the local dialect, pidgin, throughout. Hawaii has a natural juxtaposition of struggle and acceptance; paradise and poverty, with a delicate tension between locals and foreigners and a deep undercurrent of drugs and addiction.