Native Hawai­ian author Malia Mau­nakea has done it again with book #2 in her Lei and the Leg­ends series for mid­dle graders. Her newest book, Lei and the Invis­i­ble Island, takes Lei and the gang on a some­times wild, some­times scary, but always fun and sat­is­fy­ing adven­ture. Lei and the Invis­i­ble Island begins where Lei and the Fire God­dess left off. Just when it seems that Kaipo, her best friend and ʻau­makua, is safe, his pen­dant goes miss­ing. Now the race is on to save Kaipo from obliv­ion. The ever-resource­ful Lei gath­ers her friends and takes the read­er on an adven­ture that is ulti­mate­ly indige­nous at its roots. Yet todayʻs read­er will find the sto­ry acces­si­ble because of its fresh, mod­ern take on tra­di­tion­al legends.

I’ve missed you, my read­ing and writ­ing friends! It’s been a lit­tle while since my last blog post, but that’s because I’ve been work­ing on a cou­ple of man­u­scripts. As Stephen King once said, When you’re writ­ing, the book is boss. No kid­ding. My debut pic­ture book, Kaho’olawe: The True Sto­ry of An Island and Her Peo­ple (illus­trat­ed by Hari­nani Orme) is sched­uled for Spring 2025. And look what I found in Publisher’s Week­ly Spring 2025 Children’s Sneak Peak issue! 

Author Valerie Bollingʻs pic­ture books are always great choic­es for kids. Her col­or­ful, lyri­cal ear­ly read­ers and pic­ture books focus on the joys and tri­umphs of child­hood. Her first non-fic­tion pic­ture book is a col­lec­tion of bio­graph­i­cal sketch­es, I See Col­or: An Affir­ma­tion and Cel­e­bra­tion of Our Diverse World. The col­lec­tion’s short yet engag­ing for­mat makes it the per­fect intro­duc­tion of short biogra­phies to chil­dren. I am delight­ed that our own Native Hawai­ian activist and schol­ar, the late Dr. Hau­nani-Kay Trask is one of the book’s fea­tured unsung heroes.