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Hammajang Luck

Ocean’s 8 meets sci-fi in this devilishly funny and romantic heist adventure debut

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Hammajang Luck

By: Makana Yamamoto
Narrated by: Jolene Kim
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About this listen

 One last job could buy them their freedom - or cost them everything . . . Discover the high-octane space heist adventure from Makana Yamamoto - unmissable for fans of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo.

HAMMAJANG | adjective. Definition: In a disorderly or chaotic state; messed up. Chiefly in predicative use, esp. in all hammajang. Etymology: A borrowing from Hawaiian Pidgin. Source: Oxford English Dictionary.

Edie is done with crime. Eight years behind bars changes a person - costs them too much time with too many of the people who need them most.

And it's all Angel's fault. She sold Edie out in what should have been the greatest moment of their lives. Instead, Edie was shipped off to the icy prison planet spinning far below the soaring skybridges and neon catacombs of Kepler space station - of home - to spend the best part of a decade alone.

But then a chance for early parole appears out of nowhere and Edie steps into the pallid sunlight to find none other than Angel waiting - and she has an offer.

One last job. One last deal. One last target. The trillionaire tech god they failed to bring down last time. There's just one thing Edie needs to do - trust Angel again - which also happens to be the last thing Edie wants to do. What could possibly go all hammajang about this plan?

Ocean's 8 meets Blade Runner in this trail-blazing debut science fiction novel and swashbuckling love letter to Hawai'i about being forced to find a new home and striving to build a better one.

'A high-throttle space heist - but make it gay? Sign. Me. Up.' - S.A. MacLean, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Phoenix Keeper

'Swashbuckling and heart-warming in equal measure' - Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated author of The Ten Percent Thief Literature & Fiction Science Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy

Critic reviews

Hammajang Luck has more to say than Ocean's 8, the setting is more thoughtful and relevant than Blade Runner, and you still get the heist you came looking for! Seriously. What more could you ask for? It's an easy, fun read, which will make a lot of readers smile for all kinds of reasons. Recommended!
Fans of Ocean's Eight and Leverage will find this a delightful ode to team heists. The enemies-to-lovers trope, queer characters, and Hawaiian culture and language create a unique backdrop for a familiar plot line
This is a blast
A splendid addition to the genre
All stars
Most relevant
Story was a slow start but ended strongly. Great characters.
Performance was tough in places as sentence phrasing was stilted, but at 1.3x speed was much better. Pronunciations and voices were pretty great.

Steady building and sweet story

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This was a real mixed bag and didn’t benefit hugely from its setting. The space station and heist for one trillion credits gave cartoonish Dr Evil vibes. Turning to a life of crime to pay for your relative’s cancer treatment also feels like a very tired trope.

There were good bits. The dialogue was good and I liked the start when all the characters were introduced and assembled into a team. The heist itself was ok but the idea that a company would only make one prototype of a trillion dollar product that they couldn’t reproduce and leave it in a safe which could be cracked by someone pressing an ear to the door listening to the tumblers felt a bit farfetched.

The romance was ok and never got too explicit although the ending seemed to contradict the earlier opinions of the characters. It was a bit too love conquers all, everything’s perfect and wonderful for me.

Finally, don’t listen to this as an audiobook. The narration was good but many of the characters converse in Hawaiian Pidgin rather than English for long sections. This wouldn’t have been too hard to follow in a book but pausing an audiobook periodically to Google things like “What does Tutu mean in Hawaiian Pidgin?” started to annoy me.

Not as good as I hoped

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