Product Review

“I could see how much she despised me when her face was inches from mine. I could hear it when she was screaming at me in that thick Irish accent, ‘Act like you know a little something!’ ”

A mother’s love is supposed be the constant in a child’s life. But for Rab, it’s not. What if a mother created a child and hated it? It was the 1960s, and a feeling of hope and prosperity was in the air.  The American dream was unfolding for everyone it seemed, except for one family in Hawai’i.

The island paradise of Oahu becomes a prison for the young narrator, named Rab, and his mother who is lost in her own reality. Rab becomes determined to escape the mother’s madness— “I had to define myself, or become lost in what my mother told me I was.”  He fights to break the paralyzing grip his mother has on him.

Faceless Strangers shows the struggles Rab faces as he tries to gain the love from his mother that he will never have.