Blurbs and Reviews

“Don Mitchell captures the essence of the stain of inhumanity on life in a small and intimate place, where the skeletons in our closet are buried under the detritus of our daily lives deeper than anywhere else. Mauka is an intimate portrait of the slow poison of shame and guilt, harrowing and heavy.” —Scott Kikkawa, Hawai‘i author of the “Sheik” Yoshikawa noir detective novels

"Mauka is at once a sensitive portrayal of older love, an interrogation of shame across cultures and generations, and an inventive exploration of what is possible in a dialogue with the past. Mitchell, a beautiful stylist, has a keen eye for the tender or humorous detail, and he imbues even the most philosophical passage with the thrum of suspense.” —Becky Cooper, author of We Keep the Dead Close

“There are two types of novels set in historical or geographical locations: one where the author is clearly winging it, and the other when they have such a firm hold on the specifics of time and location and historicity that the reader feels as if they’ve shared the experiences of the characters. Mauka is distinctively the latter, a nuanced look at violence in its many forms and ramifications: geological, physical, sexual, cultural, and tectonic. It’s also a love story, however fraught, as any good love story is bound to be.” —Sean Beaudoin, author of Welcome Thieves “

"The central characters in Mauka are runners, a man and a woman in their 70s. This is no mistake. The book is about running into and out of the past, away and toward the truth (or at least the facts), around the circuits of lives. It is a book about connections. As June, narrator and central character, notes early on: ‘I didn’t want to leave him. I felt connected, a new thing for me.’ It’s also a detective novel, in the manner of Oedipus Rex; characters investigate crimes only to discover their own complicity in them. The book is set in Hilo, a town of dark histories, on the island of Hawai`i, which is one of the few places on earth regenerating (and, sometimes, destroying) itself. There’s a tender, late love story, and a plot that doesn’t insist on neat, final connections. As Pema Chödrön writes in one of the headnotes: ‘...the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and fall apart.’ Don Mitchell makes room for both to happen.” —Susan M. Schultz, Emerita Professor of English, University of Hawai`i-Mānoa

Foreword Review

Flush with geographical symbolism, Mauka is a thoughtful novel about late-life reckonings—and romance. Don Mitchell’s layered novel Mauka considers the topography of a romantic relationship in retrospect. Two people reconnect sixty years after high school, after lives spent trying to escape their hometown, Hilo. June is Japanese American; Max is a white American. Against the stunning Mauna Kea landscape, marked by waterfalls and volcanic glow, they have poignant, heavy, intimate, and healing encounters that are covered with elegiac solemnity.

Teenage traumas shaped who June and Max became: damaged adults. June survived a gang rape and was orphaned by a tsunami; Max, an archaeologist, lost a woman he loved to murder and was a suspect in the case. As he and June excavate their pasts, he reflects that “each layer shows that something stopped, there is a hiatus, and then something began again.” Indeed, his and June’s pasts are not covered in a linear fashion alone, but in terms of the strata within their emotional landscapes. In a similar fashion, June uses places and processes of riangulation to locate herself within her traumatic memories and to honor lost family members, even those who did not behave as family members should.

Though it moves at a slow pace, the novel produces trenchant insights throughout. It introduces and contends with kuleana—the Hawaiian notion of responsibility: for one’s past, life trajectory, and how one’s actions or negligence affect other people. For instance, June’s situation is complicated by the guilt of secrecy following her assault. Still, her self-exploration reveals sexual desire, intertwined with death and beauty in a dance, like a tango. Her narration is measured and philosophical, revealing how her mind works through aging. Max’s narration is more avoidant and slippery, complicated by his past academic ambitions, youthful arrogance, and the realization that one mistake can stop a layer of life and begin another.

June and Max share their traumas as short stories which they read aloud to each other, exemplifying the therapeutic nature of being able to own one’s narrative. June’s recounting of how her parents died in the tsunami is harrowing. Whether through the destructive force of a tsunami or the fiery beauty of Pu’u Kole, nature offers its healing power. As they hike and reveal themselves amid the transcendental beauty of Mauna Kea, June and Max’s late romance reflects a process of rebirth and regeneration that brings joy and contentment, although the past is still a complicating factor. Mauka is an introspective novel whose heroes’ considerations of the past are both polysemous and surprising.

ELAINE CHIEW (August 4, 2026)

Booklife Review

Set in the town of Hilo on Hawai’i’s Big Island, this piercing novel of return and re-connection from Mitchell (author of Red Woman Was Crying) finds June Nakashima, a Japanese American mathematician who fled the islands after being orphaned by the 1960 tsunami, coming home in her 70s to face what she left. One welcome discovery: Max Nelson, now a retired anthropologist but also always the “haole” boy she admired in the high school band, who has likewise returned, bearing his own regrets, secrets, and accumulated defenses. They meet at a morning 10K, where both win their age groups, and June thinks, “Now somebody knows I’m back.” With charged lyricism and deep feeling, Mitchell charts their slow, careful falling toward each other, as each also excavates decades-old traumas.

Their reunion unfolds through hikes across Mauna Kea, lava fields, forests, and tsunami sites, where conversations about writing, aging, violence, and forgiveness feel connected to the land and water. Mitchell movingly demonstrates how closed-off people with a shared past can, with time, begin to unlock each other: “Max had cried with me, but I wondered whether he ever cried alone,” June muses. Mitchell structures the novel through alternating June and Max chapters, separated by shorter standalone pieces that explicitly note a launching-point phrase borrowed from the preceding entry, deftly suggesting that these two have shared more than they knew over decades. One Max passage opens with “I picked up on: ‘you’re not one of us,’” a line from June’s account of her Indiana winter—she had felt that even though nobody said that to her, they all meant it—before exploring a time he, too, felt deep alienation.

Mitchell’s prose is patient, conversational, and unusually attentive to thinking itself. Dialogue often wanders into philosophy without losing the characters’ individuality. Mitchell captures essences of these lives and their home with care and beauty while exploring whether love at 70 is different from love at 20. Perfect for readers who appreciate love stories of experienced hearts laid bare.

Takeaway: Patient, moving novel of late-in-life reconnection in Hawai’i.

BlueInk Review

Don Mitchell's Mauka —meaning "to the mountain"— is a dramatic, character-driven account set in a vividly described Hawai’i. The story focuses on two former high school classmates, now in their 70s. June Nakashima, a divorced, former math professor, has recently returned from a lifetime on the mainland to her hometown in Hilo, Hawaii. There, she runs into an old classmate, Max Nelson, a gig archeologist and writer. The two begin to reminisce and soon become hiking partners, sharing their daily lives.

June, the story’s narrator, eventually admits she has returned to Hilo to confront a rapist who assaulted her decades earlier. She intends to write about the event in her planned memoir. Max, in turn, reveals the murder of his former college girlfriend, Kate, some 50 years ago. The crime was never solved, but Max learns the case has been reopened.

The two decide to write their stories, with an interesting twist: Each will take a line or phrase from the other's writing and use it as a prompt for their own next piece. This back-and -forth helps propel the chapters forward. The story plays out against the backdrop of the Island's natural beauty, making the landscape a character unto itself, from the cacophonic chorus of coqui frogs to views of volcanic eruptions.

Hawaiian words and language appear throughout, adding further native flavor. Characters are well-developed, and Mitchell weaves a mystery into the story involving the investigation into Kate's murder.

Some readers might find June’s sexual thoughts excessive. For example, after Max gets a bit of her blood on his hand: “I wondered how I’d feel if he licked my blood from his finger...It came into my mind, I inspected the thought, I decided it would be strange and interesting, and maybe a bit sexy—the licking part, anyway.”

Overall...this is a well-written novel that should appeal to literary readers drawn to an unexpected, late-in-life romance.

(Reviewed: July 2026)