Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was my first foray into Sarah Vowell’s stuff and, from the blurbs on the back of the book and the jacket description, it sounded like a great time.
I enjoyed the first dozen or so asides, but found myself wishing she’d just get on with the story a few times. I’d never really thought about the history of Hawai’i all that much before — I’d seen the Hawaiian independence folks before when we visited a few years ago, visited a few pre-missionary sites on the Big Island that we really enjoyed, the site when Captain Cook arrived, but didn’t know much else of the recent history of the island.
The book gave an interesting insight into where the tensions between the white missionaries (and their tourist ancestors/brethren) and the locals have arisen. But I found myself rushing through the book just to get it over with, at a certain point — I think I just found asides like “a vessel so crappy it made the Mayflower look like the QE2″ tedious, rather than amusing after a while, they broke up the flow of the story so many times that it became distracting.



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