Yesterday evening I apparently reached the point in Hammajang Luck where all the planning and preparation for the heist of the millennia was complete, the top of the roller coaster, and all that was left was action, action, action before denouement. In Makana Yamamoto's debut, Edie returns home after a stint in prison and finds that in the far future at Kepler Space Station corporate power has grown even stronger, distorting the lives of regular people.
Edie finds that regular employment is impossible to find when you've made it onto the blacklist of Joyce Atlas, the trillionaire leader of Atlas Industries and beneficiary of that concentration of corporate power. Confronted by the impossibility of quitting crime, Edie is recruited into the plan for the heist of a lifetime which just so happens to target the same individual who blacklisted them – Joyce Atlas.
Christina at All She Wrote Books suggested this potent exploration of motivation and chosen family set in a sci-fi heist setting. I quite enjoyed the set up and execution of the heist, which was complicated and required many different characters to deliver on their expertise. Some of the characters were not deeply developed. I think there's room to give more heft to each, perhaps that's planned for future stories in the author's universe. As a summer read, Hammajang Luck delivers a reasonably paced caper story with queer characters, strong influences of Hawaiian culture, and a little spicy content.
If you're interested, take a look at The StoryGraph's entry for the book.
I had set myself a reading goal of ten books over the summer and this book makes a nice, even ten. Technically, there are several more weeks in summer here in the northern hemisphere so I may exceed my target!
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