If you are a heist aficionado, you will find a fair bit to like in this one. Set on Kepler station, it centers around Edie, back from serving time in prison for a botched theft attempt 8 years earlier. The catch is that they are released with the help of their (former?) friend Angel, the one that set them up to fall for the previous heist. And is being very cagey about a new job she wants Edie to join her on.

A lot of the set up reminds me of the Oceans movies, or the TV show Leverage. Angel assembles hitters, hackers, grifters and thieves while she dons the cape of mastermind. And simmering behind everything is the relationship between Angel and Edie. Are they friends? More? Less?

The heist part is excellent and moves as a good pace. It was the relationship between Angel and Edie that I had a hard time latching into. For so much of the story, Angel is set apart and her motivations do not feel clear or solid. The connection between her and Edie also feels abstract until it isn’t. Edie is our guide through the whole thing, and their connections to family and home on Kepler are solid and a good counterpoint to the unfolding heist. The LGBTQIA representation is also a high point for the overall story as well.

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Voyager for giving me an eARC of this title in exchange for an honest review! It is really difficult to write a satisfying heist story— because while of course you want the protagonists to win, you don’t want that win to be so easily gained. “Hammajang Luck” walked that line perfectly. There was just enough detail about heist planning that the reader could understand what the plan was, without going overboard. And, the characters encountered plenty of issues along the way. Ultimately, I think these characters provide wish-fulfillment for a lot of folks— to rob and ruin the life of an evil tech billionaire. And by god if it wasn’t satisfying to read. Like much sci-fi, the story itself is a reflection, a mirror, of our current reality, and takes this role seriously (while also not taking itself *too* seriously). Really my only issues with this novel were that the beginning was a bit rough (common for standalone sci-fi/fantasy) and that I sometimes had a hard time understanding the Pidgin— but I don’t believe either of these are reason enough to deduct a star from the rating. If you like sci-fi heists in space, you will love “Hammajang Luck.”

I liked Edie as a character and I wish that we got to know more about the other characters. I don't know that I wanted them to actually end up with Angel, she seemed kind of toxic but if they are happy I guess I'm fine with it.

I received an arc through netgalley.

This book is marketed as a cyberpunk sci-fi heist novel, and it definitely is that. I found the story to be interesting enough to finish the book, but I wasn't hooked or feeling suspenseful like a heist novel usually would inspire. I liked the overall themes, loved the ace/lesbian representation, and most of the characters were enjoyable. My biggest grievance was that I want heists to be action packed and suspenseful, but this one read more like a Lifetime or Hallmark movie. Everything goes smoothly essentially the whole time and everyone is one big happy family at the end. I just found it to be a bit boring. There were so many interesting sub-plots that I would have loved to see the author dive into more, but unfortunately the main story line was just kind of meh for me personally. It's not a bad book by any means, just not necessarily for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.

3/5 stars.

I’m not a massive sci-fi reader, but I liked the idea of the Hawaiian culture and setting in this context. However, my lack of investment in the genre, plus the snail’s-pacing of the book ‘meant my attention flagged. The characters were also not particularly interesting.

This is a hard one to rate because I loved the heist itself and the heist team and the Hawaiian culture and influence on the characters. However, the pacing really worked against it.

The heist didn’t actually start until about 40% in, and as such, we didn’t get to spend much time with any of the heist crew. Sara, Duke, and Nakano in particular get shafted by this. Also we don’t get to see anything good about Angel at all so Edie’s constant moral dilemma about following her or telling her to fuck off doesn’t land - we really could have used Andie here to build that background, but Andie was really only used to give Edie something to lose (ie the other moral dilemma).

The heist itself was tense and well-plotted, giving us a lot of choke points and brief victories. It reminded me of how much I loved the show Leverage.

I had deeply mixed feelings about this book. There's a lot to love about it, but at the same time I think that certain elements would have translated better on-screen or in a longer format, and the central "romance" was not compelling.

The good:
-The setting was well described and vivid. It leans on some classic sci-fi tropes (e.g. literal higher and lower classes), but by also weaving in specific and more personal elements like the main characters' Hawaiian cultural context and language, the author brought detail and life to what can be a very standard backdrop.
-Edie's character and journey as an individual are very powerful. I was rooting for them the whole way, even when I couldn't understand their fixation on Angel.
-Family dynamics - loved this so much! I really felt the love between Edie and Andie, and their ties with others like Cy.

I wanted more of:
-The rest of the crew - this is where I think watching a story in TV or movie form gives an advantage, because a good actor can give even a side character with minimal screen time a lot of personality. It's harder to do that in text, and I really wanted more of the other members of the crew so I could better understand how they all came to think of each other as family.
-Feeling the drama and tension of the heist itself. This book suffered a bit in comparison to a couple of remarkably well described plotting books I read recently, but honestly I think heisting is very difficult to pull off in text. I would say ultimately this element was decent but not outstanding.

I could have done without:
-Edie and Angel's romance. I don't object to the idea of them getting together eventually, but I didn't feel like the ending this story gave them was really earned.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me an ARC.

Very interesting! Sapphic lovers-to-enemies-to-????. The atmosphere was unique and not too overwhelming (coming from a person who tends to avoid sci-fi). I really liked the main characters and the dialogue between them. The world is thoroughly developed although there are some confusing moments. LGBTQ cyber-punk meets money heist with hints of Six of Crows.

That being said, I don’t think I am the target audience for this book. I loved aspects but felt like parts were a little childish. If the **light smut*** was removed, I think this would be a young adult book. Obviously no problem with YA but just not what I expected. Very fun and lighthearted (ish) read with A LOT of diversity. Loved the non-binary MC

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the ARC!

3.5, rounded up to 4

I am always a sucker for a heist story, and Hammajang Luck certainly delivered on that front! And the quirk that really makes this one stand out is the dynamic between Edie, our main character, and Angel Huang. Yamamoto brings the reader through the whole affair like a dance, bringing them closer together, then apart, drawing the reader into their history and the tension between them in a way that had me hooked. More than wanting to know what happened, I wanted to understand Angel through Edie's eyes.

The heist crew was a fun group, though I feel like some of them had more depth than others. It's hard to write a whole group of interesting criminals that the reader wants to root for, so I'm perhaps more forgiving due to my soft spot for heists than other readers might be. The pacing lagged in a couple places, and the ending felt a bit rushed and TOO neatly tied up in places, which is why even though I was going to give this a solid 4, I dropped it to a 3.5 right at the end. The world-building was good; if you would normally shy away from science and tech-heavy scifi settings, HL is a relatively safer pick in that regard. The Hawai'ian cultural influences feel natural and add a colorful filter to an otherwise box-standard, near-future scifi setting.

I haven't read Gideon the Ninth, so I'm not sure if it's a good comp, but Ocean's 8 and Blade Runner feel like accurate comps. I would argue that using Ocean's 11 would be fine too, since not everyone on the crew is a woman, but that's probably a nitpick on my part.

This has all trappings of an exciting, heart warming story - a heist with a found family. I was really intrigued by the set up and I loved that the main character was in their late 20s and had lived a little bit. However the execution fell a little flat. I couldn’t have been less invested in the romance (I’m not convinced they actually like each other) and was only marginally more interested in a majority of the side characters. What kept me reading to the end was the MC’s family and how that dynamic played out.

Thank you Harper Voyager and NetGalley for the advanced reader copy.

I was so delighted to be selected for an ARC of Hammajang Luck!

Set in the mid 2100s, this fast paced heist novel is part of a universe where a Jeff Bezos level villain has taken over almost every industry on New Earth. A complicated and lovable group of criminal plans to take down the company and walk away with 125 billion credits…each. Of course, that is if they can forgive one another for their past transgressions.

I strongly reccomend picking this book up once it comes out in January 2025!

🏷️ #aapireads #netgalleyarc #heistnovels #hammajangluck

Hammajang Luck is a heist book that is less about the heist than about the characters conducting it. I loved the butch and femme representation, and felt very connected to the characters, especially Duke and Nakano, the grifter couple. I cared about Edie even if I didn't understand some of their choices, and I adored the subversion of the butch martyr trope. Where this book fell a bit flat to me was the heist itself and the worldbuilding, which started out very strong but later felt like it could be any near-future city, with the space element fading out of relevance. Part of this is due to real-world tech catching up (I know several people with RFID implants). Calling a heist book formulaic is like complaining that water is wet, though--that's part of the fun of the genre--so I still highly recommend it! You'll fall in love with at least one character, guaranteed.

Hammajang Luck is a novel set in the sprawling cyberpunk society of Kepler Space Station in a future when humans have established themselves all over the galaxy. Edie, the main character, receives an unexpected gift: a chance at early parole, an opportunity to go home to Kepler, see their family, and restart their life. Except their ex, Angel, is waiting outside the prison with an offer almost impossible to refuse: one last job; one last heist; one last run, and the chance to truly live beyond the walls of prison.

The heist aspect of this novel is what drew me in, but I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by everything else I found, too. A cast of really cool, interesting characters who run the gamut from hacker to runner to mastermind to ingenue all set against the backdrop of the working class struggle. Edie and their friend Cy are both trans characters whose gender diversity is central to their personhood but not so much to the plot; in other words, they are trans, and they are partaking in a heist. I also love the Hawaiian future-punk pidgin that crops up here and there in the book; a little reminiscent of The Expanse in a lot of ways but with its own unique twist. The heist itself is well written and the execution kept me intrigued, as did the exploration of Edie's relationships with their sister and family, with friends both old and new, and ultimately with Angel, the now successful ex who sold them out and sent them to prison in the first place.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avon/Harper Voyager for this eARC!

This book promises to be a queer, cyberpunk Ocean’s Eleven, and that is exactly what you get, plus some. It is confident, has a strong and engaging voice, and is a lot of fun to experience.

The story itself is not incredibly original. Our main character emerges from prison, has the promise of one last job to rule them all, and then we get to watch them assemble a motley crew as they plan a heist against a despicable antagonist who you feel good rooting against. The villain isn’t a casino magnate but instead an absurdly wealthy tech CEO that is a cross between Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson, but otherwise the overarching plot is pretty much what you would expect, including the occasional wrench in the plans and the eventual outcome.

However, what makes this story stand out from the crowd is not just the cyberpunk futuristic setting of a colonized space station that is ravaged by wealth inequality and corporate, capitalist greed, but the characters at the center of the story and the pure love for those characters that the story carries within itself. We have a number of queer characters, including trans representation, but that is hardly the most interesting thing about them. In this timeline their gender and sexual identities aren’t any sort of point of contention, it isn’t a single locus of conflict in the story, and yet the author still manages to celebrate their diversity and make it a meaningful part of their identity. More importantly is the love for Hawai’i and the cultural communities and families that come from the island. The characters’ cultural sentiments and outlooks, as well as their language patterns, are incredibly specific. This specificity drives this story, accentuated by immersive and skilled dialogue that switches between Pidgin and mainland English from one paragraph to the next depending on which characters are in conversation. The queer/Pacific Islander/cyberpunk works really well to make something unique and fun. Our main character, Edie, is at the center of the story. This is what helps distinguish the story from other heist stories, because they are more than a simpler suave thief, they have an intimate personal life and a deep love for family, a family we spend a lot of time with. Their characters feel genuine and complicated and really well-rounded, and they set this story apart.

The writing and pacing were consistently strong, and the secondary characters were also interesting, though they more or less fit into expected archetypes. This kind of is to be expected with a large-cast heist story, but attention was given to some of them to flesh them out a little more, make sure the audience had something more to grab onto with each of them, and I appreciated that. The story was familiar, and almost expected, at least if you’re a fan of the genre, but that gave it a very cozy kind of feeling. I knew what to expect of the plot, so I was free to focus on other details, like characters, and so on. I would have liked a few surprises, along the way, and it would have been nice to have spent a little more time with some of the other crew members, to fill out those characters a little more. In addition the ideas, about what we are willing to do for those we love and how what it means to make something out of nothing when the odds are stacked against you, they are perfectly lovely and they do support the story, but they are also a little simple and easy, and I wouldn’t have minded if they had a little more heft to them, a few more thorns or complications. Those are the main reasons for only 3.5 stars, because I felt like the rich tapestry of this world--the culture and this group of characters—had so much to offer and while what we got was incredibly fun, it held the promise of more. Still, though, a really good time. It had me smiling the whole time, and I enjoyed spending time in the world and didn’t want to put it down. It isn’t particularly complicated or genre-breaking, but it has great representation, has strong writing, and is definitely fun.

(Rounded up from 3.5)

I want to thank the author, the publisher Avon and Harper Voyager | Harper Voyager, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Hammajang Luck is a fast-paced and compelling sci-fi heist. When Edie is released from prison, she vows to steer clear of crime. She’s already lost enough time with her family and only wants to provide for them. Too bad that her ex-friend Angel has different plans. Edie has no interest in Angel’s plans, especially since their last heist is what landed her in prison for eight years. Yet Angel is planning one last heist that will set all of them up for life. As Edie is persuaded to risk it all for an epic heist, will she be able to reconnect with Angel and provide for her family?

I loved reading Hammajang Luck! I particularly love a good heist plot. Makana Yamamoto weaves in sci-fi elements and Hawaiian pidgin to create a compelling story. I appreciated the inclusion of pidgin and the traditions from Hawaiian culture. Edie is a fascinating character who has been forced to make difficult choices, but is finally prioritizing her family above all else. I loved the complex family dynamics, especially between Edie and her sister. The queer rep is incredible, from the sapphic romance at its heart to the excellent side characters. I loved the queer found family and how they all looked out for each other.

Hammajang Luck is perfect for readers seeking an epic sci-fi heist, queer found family, and witty banter. I’m looking forward to seeing what Makana Yamamoto writes next!

Thank you to Makana Yamamoto, Harper Voyager, and Netgalley for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

For publisher: My review will be posted on Goodreads, Amazon, Storygraph, and Barnes & Noble etc.

3.75 stars!

Thank you to Makana Yamamoto and Harper Voyager for this ARC in exchange for my full, honest review!

Good times were had all around! This has the right combination of fun, emotion, and vibes to make it just a really solid read which I actually think is really difficult with heist novels so kudos to the author for that.

Edie is fresh out of prison, only to immediately be embroiled in a heist which could surely send them back for good. I was really engaged by the world of this book, to some extent moreso than by the plot. It's got the classic cyberpunk feel but with a bit of sun and grime baked in that make it feel novel and dynamic. I do like the characters and I think seeing their little moments of interaction and affection leading up to the heist were some of my favorite parts. The heist itself was a little flat, punctuated by unexpected moments but in a very predictable-feeling way. I think emotional and interpersonal tension was really well established in the early parts of the book and it felt like that all got brushed away in an attempt to have a clean conclusion.

All around, well done and enjoyable but not stand-out for me in particular. I do look forward to seeing what Yamamoto tackles next because this is a really great debut!

Happy reading!

Like any heist story, Hammajang Luck hits all the familiar beats: a mastermind, a grifter (or two), a hacker, a thief, a fighter, an evil trillionaire just begging to be stolen from, and so on. I went in expecting an Oceans 8/Leverage-esque heist story, and that's exactly what I got. There's the build-up and prep, the context and motivation for our main POV, Edie, the tension between the mastermind, Angel, and Edie, and the overall capitalistic setting that has put the characters in their relative positions and wanting to get the job done. Ultimately, it's nothing "groundbreaking" in the heist genre, but I absolutely loved the space station/cyberpunk dystopia setting, and the Hawaiian representation and culture present throughout, and the queer contexts of the various main and side characters as well. If it was longer, I would have loved to see the other members of the crew developed, and some better fleshing out of the dynamics between Edie and the crew, but overall this is a solid heist story. A huge thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for a copy of this eArc in exchange for my honest thoughts!

I only have good things to say. It’s fun. It’s fast. And it’s queer. It reminded me at lot of Borderlands and Arcane, two of my favorite things (with a lot less violence).

I love sci-fi in my movies (and this would make a phenomenal screenplay!), but usually not in my books. It can be cumbersome and hard to envision for me, but Hammajang Luck didn’t let me down. The sci-fi elements were solid and tangible. Makana Yamamoto really pulls the reader into their world and makes it fantastical but easy to digest, even for those not as well versed in the sci-fi genre. I loved Kepler and the way the environment was set-up, lower wards vs higher wards, and the way class systems were really divided by their physical placement. I could have read a book about just Kepler and been perfectly happy.

The characters were likable and realistic. I appreciated seeing each of their strength and their flaws. I reveled in Edie’s anger and their twisted and confused feelings over Angel. I felt the tension in their interactions and felt Edie’s conflicted loyalties and their concern over whether (or when) Angel would put herself over them again. But Malia was definitely my favorite, and I loved seeing the way she connected with Edie and her confidence in herself and her own skill.

I really have no real critique for this novel. I loved every second of it. Like I said in the beginning, it’s fun and it’s fast. The pace is comfortable, and everything happens so quickly that the characters don’t linger over their choices or languish with too much time on their hands. This is the first heist novel that I’ve read, so while I can’t comment on how this one compares to others, I felt Yamamoto devised an excellent story.
And I definitely can’t complain about a rich man getting what’s coming to him.

This was a DNF for me at about 20%. By that it was clear I was never going to get into this story. It felt very distant and lacked much to give the setting life, it’s a shame because it sounded interesting and the cover is beautiful.

Note: ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was able to read this ARC courtesy of NetGalley.

A fun heist story in space! I enjoyed the fusion of a scifi heist story with Yamamoto's Hawaiian heritage. I hope this is not the last of their work!