If you’re looking for a good heist book, look no further. This one had everything. Great characters, nail-biting tension and, as the title suggests, a lot of chaos.

I loved the way the author used Hawaiian culture in this book. It really worked with the theme of gentrification and the sense of a community being taken away from the characters. I feel like this is something that people from Hawaii have faced a lot, and the books covered a lot of issues that were important to the Hawaiian people.

I liked the main character, Edie, a lot too. Their relationship to gender was important to me as a queer person and I liked how it was never defined in the book. Edie is a character who doesn’t mesh with a particular idea of gender and they lived in a world that accepted and allowed them to express themselves however they want. It was a good world to see.

I really, really enjoyed this book and hope others enjoy it too.

This is one of those novels that probably would've made for a better movie than book: it's got an interesting futuristic setting, diverse ensemble cast whose burgeoning friendships might be more convincing if you see body language and so on, as well as too much of repetitive internal monologue (especially in the second part of the book) that would definitely not make it to a movie.

While there were some nicely done scenes when the team was preparing for the heist, the pacing was off and the main event itself somehow failed to deliver in terms of intensity, even though things did not go according to plan and several characters almost died - but you could tell they wouldn't really, so. Edie's internal conflict (keep on the straight and narrow or commit this one final Robin Hood style crime or sell out to the feds to keep their family safe) is of course predictable in this type of story but does that mean it had to be done in a way that leaves the reader largely indifferent? The latter part of it, with the police, is the silliest of all, because [SPOILER basically the only time it matters is when Edie is about to asphyxiate and considers calling them and turning informant to save if not their life then at the very least their family - you're a minute away from dying, is that really enough time a) for them to somehow save you? b) for you to tell them anything of importance to fulfil your part of the deal?]. There are also some musings about the sense of belonging and family ties, but sadly none of it struck home for me.

Another thing the book was definitely going for the found family trope, which I normally appreciate, but here I guess it was too many characters to flesh out properly and thus too little investment on my part.

3.5 rounded up to 4

I was drawn to this book from the description, cover and title. After a little investigating I found the meaning for hammajang - an Hawaiian pidgin adjective that means "in a disorderly or shambolic state" or "messed up". This aptly describes the luck and story journey experienced by the lead character Edie.
Edie has been in jail on Kepler for eight years, when she receives an unexpected break and finds herself released on early parole. However this has been orchestrated by Angel, the woman who ratted them out eight years ago, leading to the jail time. Angel has an offer of one last job for Edie, high stakes but with a rich reward, however now Edie is out she wants to go straight so she can help out her family.
Angel is persistent, plus she has the cash to flash as she is the chief of security for Joyce Atlas the richest man in the quadrant. Angel is building a team with the right skillset for a unique heist, for which she needs Edie the best runner in the business who knows all the nooks and crannies of Kepler space stations upper and lower wards. The scene is set and just need the shenanigans to begin...
Edie is a great character, unwillingly drawn back into the criminal world, kind hearted and family orientated - all she wants is to keep those she loves safe. The story is fast paced and an enjoyable read, LGBTQ+ leads and themes - would definitely recommend.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for access to the ARC. All views are my own.

I have talked before that I love a good con…in a story! Experts doing the impossible using their skills and often there is a sense the marks deserve what they get. From The Sting to Leverage I love that theatricality, sense of style and stakes plus usually great characters to root for. It is not something I see very often though in science fiction and so when I heard the science fiction novel Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto involves a heist with a gang in the future I could not resist. The good news is that it is so good that I don’t intend for you to resist picking up a copy either.

On the far-off space station world of Keplar Edie is being released from prison after eight years on probation. They are feeling guilty at leaving their sister behind now with a third kid on the way and the eldest suffering from cancer. They cannot get a job at all and appear to be blacklisted after trying to rob the biggest company in the world. Their only option is to accept the offer from a former friend and criminal ally named Angel to join a crew and support a new robbery. The only issue…Angel got Edie behind bars in the first place. Will this end any better this time around?

What comes across massively is how well Yamamoto has a feel for a heist tale and yet creates enough angles of their own that this feels a welcome new addition to the genre. A big part of the novel’s success is how Edie our narrator creates the world for the reader and importantly the key character dynamics that power the book. Edie comes across uniquely as a blue-collar working-class grafter turned thief. Ful of smarts even if not one for the textbooks, hard as nails but also as we find when they meet their family full of love. Edie shares wit the reader all their thoughts, feelings, and fears and while they are a self-confessed criminal we’re pretty much on their side from the start. I really responded to how Edie makes the way people live in Keplar come alive. On the one hand we see a familiar tale of corporate greed, gentrification and a hard way of life getting daily harder. But also, there is a sense of a rich culture and family life bringing light and warmth to the coldest parts of space. Edie and her family carry parts of Hawaiian culture centuries after anyone in her family has seen the ocean. They pull for one another, the tease and the sense of a family shines through. Here they are both Edie’s motivation and biggest fear which adds to the dilemma of should Edie accept Angel’s offer. I too was both invested but also a little afraid myself if this family would be hurt.

In many ways we then have a traditional heist structure as Angel asks Edie to help her gather the team and we meet a succession of interesting characters. We have Cy – Edie’s own friend and a cybernetically enhanced hitter. We meet newbie Sara gymnast turned runner and on top of that the two youngsters in the form of extremely competent thief Tatiana and cyber-hacker extraordinaire and geek Malia. These add an interesting mentor/pupil and surrogate parent dilemma for Edie who at 28 is suddenly finding themselves judged as past it! The teasing and working out of the pecking order in the crew adds a great level of entertainment as we approach the finale. There are also a delightful grifter couple in the form of Duke and Nakano a well-established mature pair of con-women and lovers. As you can see it’s a diverse and queer cast that gels very neatly and then to add another interesting dimension we have Edie acting as second in command to the Mastermind Angel. Angel and Edie’s dynamic is fascinating = old friends who are feeling betrayed, a sense of scorn and yet some clear tension. Are games being played? For what purpose? To the story’s credit we are kept guessing all the way through, but the romantic tension is very strong we just don’t know until the end if it is deserved. Again, it also means Edie is moving into controlling a situation and ordering people about which is not their comfort zone but for heist fans we see a crew coming together and we pull for them. My biggest niggle is I wanted to know much more about these other characters but if I were to get a whole series exploring them more, I would not be complaining at ALL!

Then we come to the heist and again this is a finely constructed set of escalating steps from simple misdirections, conning lowly marks to increasing levels of danger and as Joyce Atlas is a fascinating intelligent and definitely evil corporate overlord so there are stakes that make us think its not going to be simple and indeed it is not. There are risks, unexpected reveals, dangers and action and it flows with the sense of style and pace I love in a con, no need to micro-explain every move but a book that trusts the reader to follow the action and put the clues together. There is a lovely high stakes actual poker game where Edie and Atlas have to battle egos and a very impressive finale where the team have to plan and improvise in equal measure. Yamamoto adds in science fictional ideas of supercomputers, memory changing devices mixed with engineering shafts and good old grifts to great effect. It feels a vivid and alive world of its own you come away understanding.

This was a hugely enjoyable read that knows the heist genre and it comes to life really well. While we get a satisfying conclusion this feels like a series where there are room for more stories and exploring of the wider cast. I would love to see what else Yamamoto has in store for us and clearly an author to keep an eye out for! Highly recommended!

Okay, so sometimes, it’s apparent from the very first page that you won’t get along with a book. Sometimes, you think you won’t, but it improves enough that you think you might be wrong! But it turns out your first instinct was correct and now you’ve spent god knows how long on a really boring book.

However! That was truly the only issue with Hammajang Luck. It was, otherwise, entirely and utterly okay. Yes, that translates (to me) into a 2 star review, but it was sort of… inoffensively boring? I read to find out what would happen at the end, but I didn’t necessarily feel compelled to.

Really, I don’t have much more to say about this one because of that. The characters were alright, but not spectacular, and some of the twists you could see coming a mile off, but. Again. It was okay. In fact, the only bone I have to pick here is about a metaphor. Could someone (anyone) explain to me what exactly it means that someone “could have carved her initials out of the tension in the air”?

I wasn’t sure if I would like this book as I am quite particular about my sci fi - but the premise of a sci fi Oceans 8 in space made me think it was worth a go. It was definitely worth it. It was a slick story, the two main characters had the right amount of tension and you cared about whether they would make it in the end. It had pace, and kept you reading - I found myself reading more and more at each sitting. Thank you NetGalley for the early copy of this.

A very unique book that I enjoyed quite a lot! Fast paced and such a page turner.
A book that's hard to put down. The characters were written really well, and I'd love to read more from this author in the future!

This cyberpunk heist novel set in space brings interesting sci-fi elements to a plot that fans of Ocean’s Eleven/Eight will love.

When ex-criminal Edie is released from their prison sentence early, the last thing they expect is for their one-time partner and love interest - the one who betrayed them and ruined their life eight years ago - to seek them out again for one last con. If they can pull it off, along with a group of the very best acrobats, con artists, hackers and fighters, they can take down a corrupt oligarch and secure enough money to save their family from bankruptcy, all at once. But if they fail, prison will be the least of their worries.

The gripping story has all the good tropes: lovers to enemies to lovers, found family, second chance, band of misfits and more. There are incredibly high stakes and mixed motivations, all of which play out clearly in your head, and the relationships between the central group are complex and believable, showcasing character growth well.

The heist itself is cleverly crafted, studded with mistakes, so you’re constantly on the edge of your seat. The language used in dialogue - a variation on Pidgin English - threw me a little at first, but after a while it got easier to read and shed light on the characters’ backstories and upbringings.

I recommend this to anyone craving an adrenaline rush or looking for a book that reads like an action movie.

Hammajang Luck does what my favourite heist stories all do—it makes the motive for the heist actually personal. By giving us an insight into Edie’s family situation, medical bills and financial struggles, it’s completely believable that they take on a dangerous heist, and it also encourages us to root for their success the whole way through. I did wonder why exactly Edie would trust Angel after her ‘betrayal’, but it was also clear from the beginning that there was more to that story than we were being told.

There was a good mix of action sequences and allowing enough space to characters and their motivations. The prose was clear and readable, with the protagonist’s voice clear throughout. The setting might have been a bit more developed—it felt at times like a pretty generic cyberpunk space colony, though this improved once we got introduced to more of the mods and technology unique to this world. About two-thirds through, the pace really picked up, and from then on I flew through the book and loved every scene

I loved the non-binary representation and the diversity of all the other characters. There was no tokenism; it was genuinely diverse. Overall a really enjoyable sci-fi read, light on the science but big on heart.

Hammajang Luck is an enjoyable read, although surprisingly slow-paced for a heist tale. There aren't a large number of twists and turns - instead, the focus is more firmly on Edie's personal life, her struggle to find a balance between what is necessary to survive and living by the code she wants to, and the surrounding cast of characters. This leads to the majority of reveals focussing on our characters' histories - which I found satisfying. Although some of the heist team could have had more thorough backstories, they were all endearing and played off each other nicely. The world-building isn't intense here - we learn that we are in a corporation-led future dystopia, with some technological body modifications, but not much beyond that. Nonetheless, I had a great time reading this book, and would be interested in anything Yamamoto puts out in the future.

I really wanted to like this book. It's Ocean's 11 (or, more accurately, Ocean's 8), set on a space station, with a cyberpunk-ish vibe, and a queer love story, and an underlying theme of Hawaiian cultural references. The author is clearly a talented writer, and I found the book to be, mostly, well written and engaging. I particularly liked the first third or so, where most of the worldbuilding and character development happend.

Quickly, however, the book went from good, to ok, and then to bad, and, finally, to terrible. The plot is totally uninspired, and, while the setting is indeed in a sci fi context, there is almost nothing that this setting offers the author took proper advantage of. There are also so many aspects of the story that are fundamentally not credible or even remotely believable, even in the context of a fictional story (tracing the money, the old safe, hard vs soft copies, what it takes to acquire companies, etc). The more the story progressed the more it grew preposterous and almost intellectually offensive.

I also found the personal story of the protagonist to be badly woven into the main narrative. It wasn't bad per se, and neither was the love story silly, but the way it all came together just didn't work for me, and weakened both the main plotline, as well as this more personal one. It felt like the author wanted to tell this story (family, love, choices), but ended up making it cliche and forced.

I cannot recommend it. Better left unread. Hope the author puts her talents to better use in the future.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.

This was everything that I wanted when I first heard about this book. An epic space heist with diverse characters, a sapphic romance and hijinks and set in a cyber-punk world. Even though, the romance didn't quite engage me (too rushed and no enough build-up) I loved the sci-fi setting and the plot was very good. Overall, a fantastic and thoroughly entertaining read.

I’m a sucker for a good heist novel, and Hammajang Luck scratched that itch very well for me. It’s a solid heist story that took the time to develop its characters and establish stakes along the way. Throw in a strained relationship between the two lead characters and the nods to the lead character’s Hawaiian roots, and you get a fast-paced and satisfying little novel.

Personally, I think the book’s greatest achievement is the stakes that Edie has to lose, and her constant grappling of what to do in her situation. Her 8 years in prison has already had a big impact on her family, particularly her sister who is struggling financially and is depending on Edie emotionally to get through. One last job would mean they never have to worry about money again, but if things go wrong it could tear Edie away from her family permanently. Over the course of the book Edie grapples with what she and other people deem important in their lives, and whether she can ever change her ways after a sketchy past. Edie’s emotions enhanced the story fantastically, and added a lot of depth along the way.

The heist itself was a fairly standard storyline, with the assembling of a crew each with a role to play and the formulation of a plan to rob an absurdly rich and morally questionable business tycoon. I’d describe the heist plot line as simple but effective - I don’t think it was hugely inventive or groundbreaking, but on the other hand it was easy to follow at all times, and never got so complicated as to start tripping over itself. The familial nature of the heist group was a nice touch, and it was lovely to see them gel together and become friends - it matched the caring nature of the book, which is unusual in a heist story but worked well here.

Two defining features of the novel are the Sci-Fi setting and the inclusion of Hawaiian heritage to give the book a unique flavour. The latter was a great inclusion as it felt intertwined with the story, from the customs the characters follow to the language they speak - I was even able to forgive the spelled-out dialect from one of the characters, which is usually a bugbear for me in a novel! The Sci-Fi setting sadly didn’t fare as well for me, and ended up becoming almost entirely superficial. As fun as this novel is, I feel it could be altered to remove any trace of science fiction with surprising ease.

I would like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and honestly review an advanced reader’s copy of this book.

My hopes for this were maybe a little too high for it to live up to. The first 60% really dragged, and I struggled to really get invested.
Hammajang Luck is a heist story, and it does mostly focus on the heist set-up. I just wish it would invest some more time in its world building. It’s set on a space station? But 80% of the time it’s very easy to forget that while reading. You could place this story on earth, and very little would actually change.
The characters I ended up liking, but it shouldn’t take me to the halfway mark to do so. They’re all a bit trope-heavy, and I wish there was some more time spent on developing them, but none of them were awful. (Other than the stereotypical villain.)

I’ll be in the minority here, but the Hawaiian Pidgin was very hard for me to read, and it took me out of the story every single time. I fully understand and respect why it was used here, but personally it was a detriment to the reading experience.

Overall, a good heist story, a middle-of-the-road sci-fi story.

Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC.

A perfect blend of action, found family and emotions! Makana Yamamoto created an immersive world with high stakes and well-developed characters. I needed some time to get into the story, but once I did, I was hooked! A definite recommendation to those that love heist movies and amazing character dynamics

I absolutely adored this queer sci-if heist novel. This book is gripping, unique, completely charming, filled with found family, real family, getting back at the super rich, queer characters, can you forgive her after she betrayed you and put you in prison, space stations, cons and fancy parties. A great, satisfying, fun and enjoyable read.

💰 Hammajang Luck • Makana Yamatoto 💰
★★★★

Read if you enjoy:
💰 Cyberpunk sci-fi
💰 Queer romance
💰 One last heist
💰 Ocean’s 8
💰 A diverse crew that commits crimes against the rich
💰 Hawaiian Pidgin language
💰 A non-binary MC

Edie has done their time in prison, and now they’re going straight. They have a pregnant sister to look after, a nephew who refuses to speak, and a niece with cancer. Except no one will hire somebody with a criminal record. So when Angel offers one last job, for the biggest jackpot they’ve ever scored, Edie cannot resist. Even though Angel was the one that got them sent to prison in the first place.

This was such an epic book! I was constantly on the edge of my seat reading this. Loved the heist, the inclusivity, the cyberpunk vibes, the pidgin dialogue, and the dynamics between literally ALL of the characters. This is written so so well. So well in fact, that I want to know MORE. I wanna read more about how people are robotically modified (modded) and how social stratification perseveres throughout the galaxy. This is such a cool world to pass the time in. My only gripe is the romance, I was getting toxic relationship vibes im sorry 🤣🤣. Edie and Angel needed to become friends again first before any… extras. Hammajang means messed up, but this story is a success.

‘Who needs respectability when you’re rich?’

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. I must admit I usually dread heist books somewhat, as I have read several where the character make stupid decisions and the plan is so implausible that it physically hurts to try and immerse yourself into the story. However, if you are looking for a GOOD heist book where the planning is meticulous and the changes to plans felt real, then THIS is the book for you. I loved the side characters, I loved the world building and I was sad when it ended. Highly recommended.

8 years after their last job went wrong and their partner betrayed them, Edie unexpectedly gets out of prison on good behaviour. Edie is going straight. Except nobody will hire Edie after they've been blacklisted - so one last job it is. They just need a little bit of luck to pull it off in this cyberpunkm queer space heist novel.

I'm struggling to decide on a rating for this one. Aspects of it were really, really well done, and I can't point to anything that I actively disliked. There are, however, a few things I really needed a bit more of to fully flesh out and inform the story. Overall I thought it was a promising debut and I had a good time reading it, so we're rounding it up to 4 stars.

First, the worldbuilding. The physical worldbuilding was very sparse, and I didn't get much of a sense for Kepler, where it takes place. I was really impressed, however, by the 'cultural worldbuilding'. The way Edie and family's Hawaiian roots were interwoven throughout the novel- especially through the use of Hawaiian pidgin in dialogue - was really impressive. The queer rep was also very well done.

Second, the plot. The main plot was a fairly standard heist story. Well-executed, nothing too shocking. The more interesting aspects of it were definitely in how the plot was informed by the characters' backstories, but these never got fleshed out as much as I wanted them to be. I often get frustrated when authors overexplain all the background details - here, surprisingly, I felt they were underexplained at times.

Third, the characters. Edie and their family were absolutely the highlights. The relationships between them were strong and interesting. The rest of the cast was very interesting, but felt a bit stereotypical at times. Angel and Atlas in particular were too one-dimensional for me considering their roles in the story and I didn't really care much about the romantic dynamic with angel as a result of this.

I think this one might disappoint a bit if your expectations are set too high: Gideon the Ninth and Six of Crows are very high bars to clear for a debut novel. It is a good time, though, and I'll happily recommend it to anyone looking for a diverse & queer space heist. The author has promise, and I'm excited to see what they'll write next!


Many thanks to Netgalley & Gollancz for providing me with an ARC.

I saw the description for this pop up on Instagram I think and I thought it sounded like something I would really enjoy. Sadly it didn’t work for me, which was annoying because I really wanted to love it. I couldn’t connect with the characters and I found it hard to keep interested in the story if I’m honest.