Nanea is a 9-year-old girl living in Oahu in 1941. Her mother is Hawaiian and her father is white. He's from Oregon, where his parents still live. Nanea is the youngest in the family. Her brother David is 17 and sister Mary Lou is 15.
Nanea's first book starts out in a typical way. She wants to be thought of as more grown up, but then does some good and some bumbling. It's the bumbling I didn't really care for. She accidentally muddies a floor and goes running off instead of just cleaning it up. Like she's 9, not 5. That felt out of character for her. I know the point of the book is to show how war makes kids grow up faster, but they didn't need to make her that childish in that particular moment. It didn't fit the rest of the story.
So then comes Pearl Harbor and everything changes. Nanea doesn't see her father for I think almost two weeks, while he works in the Pearl Harbor shipyard (he's a welder). He was at home during the bombing so he was safe. David runs off to go help and he stays away for a few days. Mele, Nanea's dog, disappears the morning of the bombing. Her friend Lily's father is taken away because he's Japanese. Her other friend Donna and Donna's mother are sent back to the mainland US because they're "non-essential civilians." Hawaii is under martial law and there are blackouts, air raid drills, gas masks and mandatory ID cards to carry around, and curfews to deal with. Basically, Nanea's whole way of life changes and she must adapt.
She does thankfully find her dog. I think Mele is the most important pet character ever in an AG series. The only one that might come close is Felicity's Penny, but Penny's not in every book and Mele's almost always there.
Nanea pulls herself together and helps her friend Lily deal with her father being taken (he's eventually freed, as they mixed him up with someone else), she starts the family decorating for Christmas, she comes up with the idea of doing a bottle drive for the Red Cross to collect blood donations in, and she finally gets to help in her grandparents' store, which is what she wanted at the beginning of the book.
The second book picks up almost right where the first left off. It's Nanea's first day back at school, which had been closed because part of it was on fire and damaged.
Nanea loves her teacher, so the first conflict we see is a new girl getting attention and Nanea's jealous. This is a throwback to the start of the first book, when she acts really childish and now it's even more out of character, because she matured so much in the first book. I understand that part of it comes from her being upset at the changes in her life, especially her friend Donna not being there, but still. As in the first book, this is the only part I really don't like.
Nanea spends most of the book with two worries. First, she's terrified her brother is going to enlist when he turns 18 in June. Second, she heard about a program called Dogs for Defense and is convinced David's Lieutenant friend wants Mele for the program. (Spoiler: He doesn't.) So aside from the fear of them being attacked again, Nanea's worried about losing her dog and her brother.
She manages to work things out with Dixie, the new girl, and the friend group becomes a trio again. She also teaches Mele how to hula, so she's got a dancing dog to entertain the troops during the USO shows. That's why the lieutenant paid attention to Mele, because she danced, not because he wanted her for the army. He helps Nanea start a program she calls Mele Medicine, which is basically Mele being a therapy dog. I think this is possibly quite a bit earlier than the idea of therapy dogs was actually thought of, but it's still a great idea.
Unfortunately for Nanea, the first thing David does do when he's eighteen is enlist. The book ends with him going off to boot camp.
I remember when AG fans first heard about Nanea and there was some bitching about having two girls from the same time period, but Nanea and Molly could not be more different. Nanea's way of life, even before Pearl Harbor, is very different from Molly's. Nanea's books are at the start of the war, while Molly's are at the end, so she gets to see her father come home, but we'll likely never know the fate of Nanea's brother. Molly gets to be mildly inconvenienced by the war during her daily life (with the exception of her dad being gone), but Nanea is right there worrying about way more serious things than Molly has to deal with. Nanea sees the destruction first hand. Nanea does far more for the war effort than Molly does and even with her minor incidents, she feels far more mature than Molly ever does. Nanea's books also tackle one very serious subject and they mention it multiple times and that's the Japanese internment. This is one of the most overlooked horrific things in American history and it needs more coverage than it gets.
I think Nanea's main two books are very solid and a good read. She's an important addition to the historical lineup.
I'm gonna say it right now. I do not like Choose Your Own Adventure. I never have. I'm far too anal to enjoy them, because I have to mark every page with a choice and make sure I read every possible story. It's a pain!
But I got a good price on the Nanea boxed set, so I took it instead of the two classics alone.
I didn't really enjoy reading this for my OCD reason explained above, but it did have a lot of solid moments. A character is introduced who changed her name to appear less Japanese and her dad is being held on Sand Island, which was the Hawaiian place of internment. That was the best part. You also get to see Nanea expressing some of her feelings about David being gone, because this is set after her classics.
My biggest issue with it is that the character you play is kind of a chickenshit. She's a military brat, so she's been moved all over and she's not happy in Hawaii because her father is off in Iraq right now and she's not used to being away from him. She sees a dog digging in the sand (it's supposed to be Mele) and finds a shell necklace that takes her back in time when she puts it on. So the entire time, she knows she can just yank it off and go back to her home in the future, but she's still scared of EVERYTHING. There are a couple story endings that make the girls look bad, too, but I seem to remember that from Choose Your Own Adventure. There were always some bad choices.
It's an okay book and I'm glad I read it, but I doubt I'll ever reread it and I'm not going to read the other BeForever ones like this either.
Nanea's real mystery is who the hell is on her cover and what did she do with Nanea. This book is set three weeks after the end of the second classic, yet Nanea's hair is like eight inches longer. And straightish. Granted it's longer on the Choose Your Own Adventure cover, but that still looks like her. This one just doesn't.
So it took me a while to finish this one, because right away, something annoyed me. I simply despise when adults in these books treat children badly and that sets up the entire mystery.
You see, Nanea is working in her grandparents' store. She takes pride in straightening the displays, making everything look nice and helping customers leave happy. So when a lady asks for Carnation milk and Nanea doesn't see it, even though she'd just straightened the cans moments before, and when her display of oranges is suddenly a mess, she gets suspicious of a nearby boy. A boy whose canvas bag was empty-looking and now, as he leaves the store, looks rather lumpy. Nanea expresses her concerns to her grandparents...BECAUSE WHEN YOU WORK IN A STORE, YOU WATCH FOR SHOPLIFTERS. This is like Basic Shopkeeping 101. And what do they do? They make her feel like shit for not trusting the boy. Are you fucking kidding me?!! It would be one thing to say no one saw him steal so they can't accuse him, but keep an eye on him. That would be the logical thing. But to try to make her feel bad when she's just protecting the store and their money? COME THE FUCK ON.
Right away, this throws up red flags for me. The grandparents know something about this boy, but deliberately do not tell Nanea. They know he didn't steal, but don't tell her why. WHY THE FUCK NOT?!
Because this author couldn't write a better plot. I think very little of people that have such horrible gaps in logic just to make their plot work.
You see, it's not revealed until the end of the story, but Mano (the boy) trades fish he catches for food in some of the local stores, including Nanea's grandparents'.
THEY COULD HAVE TOLD HER THAT AT THE BEGINNING.
But no, poor Nanea spends the entire book freaked out about him being a thief and stealing repeatedly. As the story unfolds, some of the missing objects turn up and one really was him, stealing her father's heirloom spade. He borrowed it without asking. Well, why didn't you fucking ask? This plot element only works if you go out of character for Mano.
There are multiple subplots, including Lily's brother having a secret job and Nanea's sister getting secret letters. Everything works out in the end, but this would have been a much more solid book if the grandparents had told Nanea the truth at the beginning, which would have been in character, and she'd made a new friend, only to have to worry about what exactly he was up to. That's a better story than one that uses glaring out of character moments and a complete lack of logic as its foundation.
Gotta wrap this up quickly, but I really do like Nanea. I think she's an important addition to the lineup of girls and I hope to see her get some more mysteries in the future that are much better written!
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