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About Boi No Good (Unabridged)

Contemporary Hawaii—taro lands vanish, rich mainlanders buy up beachfront, drugs run rampant, homeless camp in the mountains, politicians make backroom deals. In 1997, social services rescues Boi (four), Shane (five), and Glory (six), three abused and neglected siblings from a junked city bus where they have been living with their frail dying grandmother and addict mother. Shane is adopted by an old-money state senator/future governor and his former beauty-queen wife. A taro farmer and his Polynesian Cultural Center hula-dancer wife take in Boi while the oldest, Glory, ends up back with her child-burning mother and a stepfather so bad that he makes her mother look like a saint. When these three siblings reunite in their teens and 20s, there are immediate conflicts as they attempt to change their life trajectories. Boi No Good is about a rich kid trying to be street tough, a criminal with a horrific past who will do anything to stay free, and a juvie turned cop who wants to both save the world and blow it up. When a pending law threatens to change the face of Hawaii, Boi will do anything to stop it even if his siblings and a governor he calls Uncle stand in the way. McKinney takes us again on a romp through noir Hawaii as he traces the life arcs of three lives grappling with emotional and social issues in a world that was not of their making. A powerful story of sibling conflict set amid sharp class and ethnic divisions exposing social ills swept under the rug to not deter Hawaii's image as paradise. McKinney rips the cover off Hawaii to show us the inside workings of our troubled Island state: from the governor's office to the cops on the beat to the drug addicts and surfers to the crony developers and the struggling souls camped in our parks and beaches. Tragic and darkly comic, bursting with creativity and exuberance, Boi No Good will take you on a ride you'll never forget.