I wrote my second novel, The Pono Way, during Donald Trump’s first administration.  Published it toward the end.  I was pleased to see that even those who didn’t really enjoy the book, still got the message: be welcoming to immigrants.  They need help, not condemnation.

The book got some good reviews and was a semi-finalist in an indie sci-fi contest, so I was pleased with it overall.   I’m glad the book arrived in time to be relevant, but I was relieved that its message, speaking out against MAGA’s particular blind anti-immigrant furor, was no longer so necessary.  

But here it is again.  FOTUS is back, and masked thugs are snatching people off the streets without warrants, badges, or accountability.  Brown people.  Foreign people.  People going to their immigration meetings.  And the occasional natural-born American citizen caught up in the sweeps.  Oops.  Trump’s brownshirts.  Hard to believe.  Hard to accept.  

So The Pono Way is relevant once again: follow the message of Leviticus to welcome the stranger among you as your own, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.  And the ethos of the United States: give me your tired, your poor… I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

This means a great deal to me.  My mother was an immigrant.  I’m a second-generation American.  I can feel it, the xenophobia.  It’s personal to me.  It’s not abstract.  I hate it!  America is built from the grit of generations of people like my mom, who took a powder on their whole entire lives, and went to live a new one in the New World.   And the people who survived being snatched from everything they’d ever known, the destruction of their ways of life. . To deny that is morally insidious.  

So, I kind of hate that the book is newly relevant again, but I’m also glad it out’s there, doing its job, a tale to point people to.  It has a happy ending! I like to write positive sci-fi. 

Also it’s short.  A short novel but I put a lot into it. It’s short, it’s on Kindle Unlimited, and it has a happy ending.  We all could use one.  So check it out!