Book Review: Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World by Jennifer Thigpen

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Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai’i’s Pacific World is a book that focuses on the relationship between Hawaiian royalty and the mission wives who arrived in Hawaii to bring Christianity.

The Hawaiian queens are immensely fascinating, and this book had the opportunity to be so as well. However, it is dreadfully dull and repetitive. Despite being a thin volume, there just doesn’t seem to come an end to it. I understand that this book was formed from a thesis, and it certainly reads like one. It doesn’t feel at all accessible to the more casual reader of history.

Unfortunately, I am afraid this one was not for me.

Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai’i’s Pacific World by Jennifer Thigpen is available now in the US and the UK.