Bitter over Sweet
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Get it here!
Bitter over Sweet
Hawaiian native Tita works to escape a vicious cycle of poverty and abuse, only to realize along the way that life can not only be better, it can be whatever she wants it to be…
Take a deep dive into the lives of real Hawaiians as we follow Tita and other native women living and struggling against abuse and despair in a world controlled by tourism’s long tail. These stories of resilience offer readers a glimpse behind the bird-of-paradise curtains and a look at what’s not in the travel magazines.
What is it like to live day in and day out in a place that everyone else considers paradise? To live within America but not be considered American enough?
Santa Fe Writers Program 2023 Literary Awards Program Grand Prize Winner
“A stunning collection. I’m a sucker for flash, for voice-y lit, for the unexpected, for the problematic, for Brown girls, for pop culture, and for playing with form, and Llanes Brownlee brings this all together beautifully in Bitter over Sweet. It’s a feat of fresh style, intricate language, imagination, grit, and so much heart.” — Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
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Praise for Bitter over Sweet
In these vivid linked vignettes, Brownlee (Hard Skin) chronicles the challenges and dreams of Native Hawaiians. In “The Black Box She’s Only Seen on TV,” a child is acutely aware of her poverty even from a young age, marking the difference between her home life and the relative affluence of her cousin. Later, in “Oceans Under Threat Like Never Before,” the girl considers how climate change will affect her family, and if they’ll be able to keep the house they built with government subsidies. Older girls, like Kim, a townie, and Jen, a university student, amuse themselves by flirting with local boys in “Another Night on da Kona Pier,” while another student, Kahea, comes home from the mainland in disgrace, “the scholarships she had worked so hard to get not enough to cover everything.” One of the more heartbreaking entries, “The Cannibalistic Sea Slug,” features an abusive mother who burns her daughter’s scalp with bleach, and intersperses the horror with scientific facts about sea slugs, who eat their own kind. Like photographs in a family album, the vignettes surface memories that are happy and painful in equal measure. This accomplished collection is worth a look. Publishers Weekly
A winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, this is an engrossing collection of stories by an Indigenous Hawai’ian woman about Indigenous Hawai’ian women. Centering [on] resilient Tita, these short narratives are incandescent and alive with grief, poverty, pain, love, complexity and harmony. Karla J. Strand and Violet Pandya for Ms. Magazine’s November 2025 Reads For the Rest of Us
In an unflinching voice, Brownlee reveals hard truths via Native Hawaiian folklore, superstitions, and cultural references. She uses language to add authenticity, alternating between Hawaiian Pidgin Creole and standard English. The result is a journey through the real Hawai‘i, away from the flash and glitz of the tourist resorts and into the imperfect heart of the land. Margie Ticknor for Library Journal
