When Middle School Kids Come Hawai‘i
A lot of the debate and rancor about today’s book-banning and cancel culture stems from the adult assumption that subject matter is being forced on children, middle grade readers in particular. All these topics! All these…characters! Can’t we just read about rabbits and talking pigs? (Oops, nope.) To dig a little deeper, THROB sent Jeffrey J. Higa, author of an acclaimed short story collection and a pidgin translation of Dante’s Inferno—and a parent himself—a new and widely praised middle-grade novel by Malia Maunakea: Lei and the Fire Goddess.
For a person who writes for a living, I sure didn’t read much in middle school. The only books I remember reading will have to act as a barometer of my interests at that tender age: Soccer (The Education of an American Soccer Player by Shep Messing), retribution (The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill) and cannibalism (Ordeal by Hunger: The True Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart).
But observing the reading habits of my Gen-Z child, I’ve learned that his preferences are less about escape and fantasy and more about what the publishing industry calls representation. In the stories they read, there is a hunger to see themselves mirrored in the facets make up their identity, whether that be, like my hapa child, a mixed cultural identity, or a gender and sexuality exploration, or even the nascent awareness of social inequalities and justice issues.
I note all of this to confess that I’m not the ideal reader for the middle grade novel, Lei and the Fire Goddess by Malia Maunakea. However, the sale of this book made a big splash locally when it was sold at auction as part of a six-figure, two-book deal for world English rights. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Maunakea and her agent pitched the book “as Finding ‘Ohana meets Aru Shah and the End of Time.” So as a writer myself, I was interested in seeing how our local culture and language was portrayed and written for a largely mainland audience.
Our hero, Anna Leilani, is a durable protagonist who leads us through an adventure story about friendships, family obligation, and the urgency of culture and history. She is what we would have called a kotonk, a pidgin appellation denoting local roots but an upbringing on the mainland. So, of course, she “no can talk pidgin,” but has no problem understanding it from her Big Island domiciled Hawaiian grandmother with whom she spends her summers in a kind of crash course on Hawaiian culture and language.
The novel opens with Anna in that summer between sixth and seventh grade, ruminating about her social failures. Initially, her goal is to rise above them by attempting to make herself more interesting to her peers through social media and thereby securing their admiration and reviving lost friendships. The betrayals we read in this novel, then, are mostly minor but familiar drama to most middle schoolers. The language is clean and the friendships are chaste, though not without depth, and the book seems perfectly pitched to the age group.
Anna spends a lot of time in her head, planning strategies and occasionally going over past regrets. This is not to say she is unlikeable. In fact, the most unlikable thing about her is that she doesn’t like SPAM musubi, to which I uncharitably thought, “A sure sign of a kotonk” that mellowed into, “Eh, homemade kine better, she just hasn’t spent enough time in the islands.”
The action begins almost immediately with the abduction of her longtime friend and Volcano neighbor, Kaipo, a gentle and sensitive lad of similar age. By abduction, I do not mean by another person, but by an almost mythical creature. The kidnapping serves as the inciting incident to mark that the game is afoot and is also an introduction into the fantasy world we are about to enter.
To avoid spoiling the novel, I will say that while the creatures and characters who make up this fantasy world are probably viewed by mainland readers as mythological, any child who has been educated in Hawai‘i would immediately recognize all of them. These beings are able to speak English, a narrative necessity, I’m sure, but it did make me wonder if, for example, a gecko whose generations have lived in a local person’s house would speak pidgin.
“Oh, for flap’s sake!” the bat said in a girl‑boss‑vibey voice, waving one of her wings in Anna’s face like she was shaking a finger. “Don’t even think about going back down that road. I mean, I know Kaipo said you were a struggle, but I didn’t think you’d be this obstinately oblivious.”
Obstinately oblivious? Wait. “You know Kaipo?”
“Keep up. I said I did. Oh, are you, like, one of those kids who likes to play jokes on people? And I thought I had it rough with Kahi.”
Kahi? Who? What? Anna’s brain scrambled to keep up.
“Come on, kuewa, we go. You do want to find Kaipo, right? I would think you’d want to help him out before Pele gets bored. She’s ended many ʻaumākua that way.”
Anna, thinking she’d lost her mind, looked up from her spot on the jungle floor. The bat used “we go” like Tūtū did. “Right. Sure. Ended ‘aumākua,” she repeated. The word tickled something from her memories, but she ignored it, closed her eyes, and counted to ten the way she’d seen her mom calm herself.
“Kuewa, you coming or not?” the bat said. This time, Anna picked up on the word but not the meaning. Kuewa? Anna opened one eye. The bat was still there. Very persistent hallucination.
The settings for the novel are also familiarly comfortable and wide-ranging—from old-style plantation houses to mauka caves to lava tubes to irrigation ditches–all the kinds of places where we used to play before the arrival of over-organized sports leagues. This makes Lei (to refer to her by her Hawaiian identity) a very physical girl with some impressive athletic skill, despite her claims to the contrary.
Throughout the novel, Lei encounters Hawaiian stories that come to life in imaginative ways that make each a little puzzle that brings her closer to the rescue of Kaipo and also closer to her own Hawaiian identity. Each incident builds in intensity and difficulty until we arrive at the penultimate event, the successful completion of which will free the captive Kaipo and bring them both home to Tutu’s house.
A trio of figures—Pele, Kamapua‘a, and Poli‘ahu—are instrumental to the plot and the construction of the climactic ending, which, much to my surprise, I found myself racing through to get to the end. The author, who is part Native Hawaiian and lives in the Rocky Mountains with her husband and two children, has written her protagonist into a situation that requires a magical solution. By this point in the novel, we are deep within a magical fantasy world so the authorial liberties taken with the narrative are understandable and even welcome to ensure a gratifying ending that befits its Hawaiian setting.
A couple of unanswered questions and open issues at the very end guarantee a sequel. Given that the novel was almost exclusively about mauka and the beach doesn’t play any role in Lei and the Fire Goddess, I think we are left with makai as the primary location for the next novel. In any case, locals and mainlanders looking to experience and present the richness of Hawaiian culture and the people of the islands in a positive light to a younger readership, now have a place, like Anna Leilani, to call home.
Image by Heather Morse.
Jeffrey J. Higa is an award-winning fiction writer, essayist, and playwright and the author of Calabash Stories, a collection of short stories. He discovered Dante’s Divine Comedy as an undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic University and has been obsessed with it ever since. In 2019, he visited Dante’s birthplace of Florence, Italy, and deepened his knowledge of Dante’s life and work. He undertook the task of transcribing a pidgin version of the Inferno while under quarantine in 2020. He completed the work in 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s passing.
