Lei and the Fire Goddess by Malia Maunakea is a story about Anna, a young girl with Hawaiian roots, who is visiting her tūtū (grandma) as promised every summer since her family had to move to Colorado. She is in the middle of conflict with her best friend, and being across the ocean while knowing her best friend is going on a trip with their once-shared enemy at school causes her a lot of angst and confusion. Anna is feeling disconnected from her roots and belonging to the islands. So much so, she will not go by her given Hawaiian name, Leilani, but rather goes by Anna. Anna doesn’t want to spend her summer learning more mo’olelo from Tūtū — they are all just stories to her. She’d rather be able to show off how much fun she wants her friend to think that she is having so that she can make her friend choose her instead.
Her long time best friend, Kaipo, is there with Tūtū to pick her up when Anna’s plane has landed. Kaipo is a reprieve for Anna, someone she looks forward to spending time with even though she doesn’t want to be away from her Colorado friends during summer. Kaipo always has her back, listens to her when she is upset, celebrates with her when she is excited, and teaches her new things, helping her have a great summer while she is in Hawai’i. Upset with Tūtū for saying she needs to learn the mo’olelo to be able to carry it on, Anna’s rages in her decision to pluck a lehua blossom right off of a tree wanting to prove Kaipo and Tūtū wrong, that the mo’olelo are just a myth. It wasn’t going to rain just because she upset the goddess Pele by plucking the blossom. The world wasn’t going to end, even though it feels like hers was, just because she didn’t ask the tree if she could pluck the flower before doing so. Yet, the moment she pulled that flower, she saw the panic on Kaipo’s face, and her entire world as she knew it changed. A giant hawk swooped down and attacked, grabbing Kaipo and flying away. The ground began shaking and splitting – the lava Tūtū warned that Pele would unleash when disrespected started flowing, directly towards Tūtū’s house. Still in doubt, she didn’t know what she had done but knew she had to get her friend back and try to save Tūtū before it was too late.
Anna’s journey up the mountain begins with Ilikea, a bat that appears and makes herself known. She can communicate with Anna, with no qualms about being just as sassy as Anna is. Ilikea is going to help Anna get to Kaipo because Kaipo is also someone important to her, and Anna will learn so much about who Kaipo really is, who Ilikea is and will be, who the people from the mo’olelo are, and who in fact she is. Struggling, fighting to get up the mountain to get to Kaipo before he is hurt by Pele, who has taken him hostage until Anna can prove herself, Anna has to fall apart to be able to come back to her true self. Her tūtū told her that actions sometimes have “consequences bigger than we can imagine” (p.103) and this is the first lesson that Anna learns. This will be one of many things that she comes to understand as she sees things and beings that she thought were all myths. Anna will meet beings from the stories she has been told, learn from the trees and animals even more, and have to make crucial connections between stories, song, language, and self to prove she is sorry for disrespecting Pele. She will relearn the traditional hula dance which will take a toll on her body, and compete with Pele to get her friend back. Anna’s journey is exciting, incredibly curious, and the reader will feel this unease as well as the victories as Anna is working through these challenges.
This story is one of a young girl reconnecting with her roots and ancestors, navigating the challenges of being a teenager in today’s technology-ridden world, and seeing for the first time that “facts and folktales coexisted” (p. 199). There is such significance in this story with what Tūtū was trying to teach her. Anyone reading this book can be reminded how vital it is to take pause, feel the Earth, and be at one with it. There is so much going on around us, too many stimuli and things that need to be done that so many of us can’t remember the last time we stood with our bare feet in the grass, dirt, sand, or ocean. This story reminds us that we might not be able to feel connected with ourselves if we cannot connect with the Earth we are living and breathing on. Anna, or Lei, as she wants to be called after she finally knows she is home and her roots are in Hawai’i, shows how important the ancestral lessons she was able to receive were to her entire being. She learned the language, stories, history, and heritage of her family and ancestors and the land that she came from. She learned what it meant to respect the land you live on as well, honoring those that came before you and the Gods and Goddesses that are there. As Lei comes back to her true self it’s hard not to feel how powerful being connected and rooted can be. Anna’s transformation as she sees how exhausted she is of trying to be something she wasn’t, just as others that she encountered on her journey were, brings us to Lei – a kid proud of her roots and wanting with all her heart now to learn the mo’olelo and keep it alive to pass it on to the next generations. We all have ancestors and lands that we can learn from and reconnect with. This book is a wonderful reminder for us to do so.
