With true grit and venom, Malae’s debut may place him in the company of some of the best protest novelists, past and present. Like Richard Wright, Malae can articulate racial alienation smack in the middle of booming America. His (anti)protagonist, hulking Samoan-American Paul Tusifalo, lives in the far cultural margins of California’s technology capitol, Silicon Valley. Tusifalo is invisible and disillusioned, a private-poet, college dropout, and a scornful and transient Robin Hood. He drifts from place to place without much purpose, or any real desire to have one.

As the novel progresses, so does our understanding of Paul’s non-motives. Through lengthy and often beautifully composed memories from Paul’s past, we witness a young man caught in the thickest parts of self-destruction, and the question he’s trying to answer is, Why? Waves of reproach and disgust, all directed toward modern American culture and many of its specific parts (including himself), are liable to creep up on Paul at the slightest trigger. But what makes him a tragic and likeable character, and distances him from other iconoclasts—characters like Holden Caulfield—is that he isn’t trying to disabuse us of our own beliefs, or romanticize the life of the “outsider.” Paul scorns the world because he’s not quite sure what else to do with it. “My only real skill,” he admits, “is being critical. Finding the flaw in the day, the sun, its light.”

But a general warning should be issued. So, a DISCLAIMER: This book features graphic language and violence, and some of its other content may not be suitable to every reader.
That said, this book is the first American novel in a long time to so openly explore modern themes of race and culture. When Paul decides to reintegrate himself into the working-world, reconnect with his family, and follow the law, he does it with a little bit of hope that the “straight-and-narrow” may bring some much needed answers and, more importantly, some desperately needed peace. And here's the thing: we find ourselves hoping, for his sake, it works. ~Jared