content: Hongo delights us with his poetic voice and I was expecting big things with this memoir. But doesn't a 'memoir' mean you've spent some meaningful time in a locale and are a bit of an expert on it? Hongo left Hawaii for California at a young age and knows little if anything about the history of the aina. His spiritual angle on looking at a leaf, stream, or hardened lava flow is somewhat interesting but the book lacks any meaningful punch because there is little or no characterization. I was expecting him to reconnect with people from his childhood but there are none. He is chasing ghosts from an invented past and the writing suffers for it.