Here we discover why the older brother needs to defeat his younger brother at board games and how they understand the workings of their parents' relationship.

A boy is suspended from Punahou School for cutting clazz and must face the wrath of his father. He runs away from home to avoid a beating and is taken in by a family in Waimanalo.

See the little girl clutching the Teddy Bear?Take an excursion into her childhood to see how she was affected when her parents divorced.

This collection of Kafkaesque miniatures offers a terrifying vision of the Worcester asylum where the writer's uncle spent most of his adult life. The asylum theme zips into overdrive in a series of sometimes darkly comic flashes threaded throughout the book. Dadio and June Spoon have created their own asylum in the burbs, one in which they 'incarcerate' their children within the confines of the home through guilt control, paternal manipulation, money, and demands bordering on the insane.

Rumor had it that Hoagie had already nailed three cheerleaders and was working on the girls in the Pep Club. Most of the girls and even some of the women teachers swooned whenever he walked by. I considered Hoagie a poacher. His age and status gave him an unfair advantage. I figured the main reason he’d picked Punahou was because of our girls. He’d dated Dawn Yamashita his first week on campus and Dawn cried her eyes out during a movie McQueen made the seniors watch. In the movie, this nai...

Ben and Jeff Gill are doing menial labor at their father's construction site on east end Molokai when Ben reports to the father that the heavy equipment operators are goofing off.One of the operators retaliates by cornering the brothers on an isolated beachfront off Puko'o Harbor.

A son sees his mother with another man at the Woolworth's lunch counter.

I slept on the makai side of the lanai. The kaka lines were tethered to the beach house and the moon made them glow as they moved up and down with the tide. These were our umbilical cords, linking us to all the mystery in the ocean. I took my foot out of the covers, slipped it under the mosquito net, and rested it on my line. I felt the ocean's pulse through the cord.

A brother and his kid sister create a parallel universe in their own household to cope with a domineering father, a passive mother, and an indifferent older brother.

The two sons of a Hawaiian attorney play a popular local game while waiting in the car outside Queen's Hospital. After a decade of infertility, their mother is close to giving birth.The pressure of a third child is getting to the father. He orders his sons around as though they were his employees. When the younger boy has a stomach ache and can't eat dinner, the father interprets this as an act of defiance.The boys feel that 'Daddy' is taking turns being one of three monste...

I knew Wayne could hurt me if I didn’t keep my gloves up and elbows in. But he was tiring too. I glanced past the top hose and saw Chip Morningstar and Bernie Fredman. Wayne had made it his annual tradition to write “To a Real Panty Waist” in Chip’s yearbook. He’d told Bernie his nose was big because air was free. I spotted Ken Ito—Wayne had humiliated him at our sophomore clazz picnic by yanking off his trunks and making him run naked past the girls. I summoned my strength and threw a rig...

A father is threatened when his oldest son gets stronger and stronger lifting weights.He orders his son to quit lifting.The son retaliates in a way his father never imagined.