Adrian Branch has the koko — the blood; his mother was part-Hawaiian. But he remembers the Islands only vaguely, from living here as a child. He has grown up in the wintery landscape of upstate New York. His father, a white supremacist furious with himself for having married outside his race, hates the Islands — "It ain't a place for people like us" — and forbids the boy to tell anyone that he's not pure Caucasian. His mother talks about Hawai'i rarely, and only when his father is away on one of his frequent absences.

Profoundly dyslexic, and agraphic, too, meaning he cannot write, Adrian gets through school by memorizing passages his mother reads aloud to him, and cribbing intellectual cant from PBS TV shows. He's likes to build things and carve wood, and labors to renovate an old house near the family home until he learns that his father lied to him — the land they live on isn't theirs, so there's no future in the work he's doing. Confined to a youth home after getting into trouble at school, he becomes close to a girl, but she commits suicide.

Disillusioned, angry-sad and alienated, he can't get through a day without frequent nips from a spray bottle of Scotch he keeps in his backpack.

His life in New York comes to an end when his father leaves for good and his mother dies of cancer, having first elicited a promise from him to take a part of her — the long hair she wears braided down her back — back to the Islands for burial. He doesn't want to do it, but he can't bring himself to break his promise: He buries her body under a tree, takes the painstakingly hoarded money she gives him, and heads for Hawai'i with her braid coiled in his pack.

This image — of something long and thick, something coiled, something with a power he cannot control or understand — pulses throughout the book in sexual scenes, in fearful nightmares about a snake that lives inside him, and in the length of hair he finally puts to rest at Malaekahana.

"He had finished the only thing he was alive for. And now he was nothing."

But right then, as he turns to leave the braid behind, his life is about to change. A young woman he has met — another lost soul like himself, also a con artist, also part-Hawaiian and also fearful that she might be nothing — becomes the foil for this image at every level. She assuages his sexual longings and his need for love. She takes seriously his mission to bury the braid, and helps him do it. And she reminds him, when he tells her of his dream, "there are no snakes in Hawai'i."

Hard and scary times are ahead, but Adrian's healing, and that of his lover, Tenley, has begun even before events from their past come back to complicate their lives.

It was interesting to read "The Braid" right after Chris McKinney's new novel, "Bolohead Row" (reviewed last week), another book that delves into the Islands' dark side, including the drug subculture.

MacMillan has many writing years on McKinney, and this novel shows it. He drops the reader into the moody and bitter opening sequence, builds the relationship between Adrian and Tenley from its rootless and distrustful beginnings to one of rare candor and belief, and displays a deft hand with dialogue and scene-building.

But "The Braid" ends with surprising optimism, as close to a storybook ending as a gritty, contemporary tale can have. Disagreements are reconciled, apologies made, financial problems ironed out, everybody's sober and a patched-together 'ohana is all together in one little hale.