"Stalking the Bird of Paradise," by Dennis L. Foster (CreateSpace, $14.50)

Artist, author and Kona resident Foster’s bio notes that he is the writer of more than 60 published books. They’re all travel, computer and business books, however, and this is apparently his first novel. Whew. Because it has "first novel" all over it.

The concept is funny, and probably sounds good in a pitch meeting. A modern door-to-door salesgirl of kitchen products tries her hand among the isolated headhunters and cannibals on a New Guinea island. Things don’t work out all that smoothly.

One symptom of First-Novel Disease is the inability to write a noun without an adjective or a verb without an adverb. "Stalking" is chockablock with descriptive and colorful phrasing, so much so that we stumble over the story, which, as it turns out, is something of an anthropological study as if imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Such florid descriptionology works if it comes from the characters, not from the writer.

"The Symphony of Leif," by Paul Y. Csige (CsiMec, Inc., $14.95 through Amazon.com)

Csige is a scarily talented young fellow from Kailua-Kona who seems able to do just about anything. His latest effort is this coming-of-age novel — apparently, a disguised memoir — about a teenage lad sent off from Hawaii to attend a Scientology boarding school in the Pacific Northeast. Everything seems swell until he realizes that the teachers are more interested in indoctrination than in learning.

The thing about coming-of-age novels is that the protagonist comes out the other end changed. They’re about metamorphosis. There’s room, sure, for settling old scores — and teenage horrors stick with you for life — but the hero is essentially mutable clay, fired by experience.

Csige seems to understand the process instinctively, and also sets up a natural rhythm in the storytelling that matches the adolescent goofiness of a boy trying to grow up.

"Hawaii — The Islands of Aloha" by Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi, photographs by Veronica Carmona, Ann Cecil, Ron Dahlquist and Philip Rosenberg (Island Heritage, $25.95)

Beautiful pictures of stunning scenery, presented in a gorgeous landscape format, with well-crafted reproduction and pithy writing. If you’ve never seen a picture book of the islands before, this may delight you, particularly at the reasonable price. For most, however, this volume will be deja vu all over again.