Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

My bad. I shudda read the description before I started this story, but the "Trip to Hawaii" part of the title enticed me in. The Transgender tag would also have warned me, had I bothered. Anticipating scenes of paradise lured me.
Having read most of it and skimmed through the rest raises this question - why bother to set a story in Hawaii (or any other exotic spot) unless you're going to also provide some local color of some kind - scenery, food, customs, history, genealogy, surfing or something? The only thing local I got out of this is that haole is the Hawaiian word for people of European descent. It's possible in my haste to get through it I missed something else.

Here you go:
https://storiesonline.net/s/16525/the-shack-the-guardians
Native Hawaiians doing Hawaiian things.

Your point makes sense to me. There are lots of reasons to read and enjoy a book, and getting a least a small sense of another place or society is one. That can be a real place or society, like Hawaii or the Amish or the military, but it could be something fantastical such as Dune or Hogwarts and the magical community in those books.