by Lisa Linn Kanae Islands Linked by Ocean is more than a collection of Hawai‘i-based short stories: It’s the verbal equivalent of a heavy, glossy coffee table book full of in-the-moment images imbued with a unique elegance and wonder by the artist who captured them. Lisa Linn Kanae conjures frame after frame, many familiar to most of us, but in a light that brings out a grace we never knew existed: a veteran steersman berating his novice stroker, the banter and gossip of women in an office breakroom, a starving dog tied to a chain-link fence behind a dumpster. My own favorite is the title story—which ironically contains the least amount of fiction—maybe because I, too, had a McKinley-alum dad who could croon like Dean Martin. And I never realized how beautifully he did so until I read Kanae’s work about her own father.