When I was a kid, I had a set of books called Great Illus­trat­ed Clas­sics. They were fat vol­umes full of sto­ries embell­ished with black and white draw­ings. The scari­est tales were from Greek and Roman mythol­o­gy where the hero bat­tled bad guys and won (most of the time.) Even in school, the myths we read were lim­it­ed to Greek and Roman gods with names like Zeus, Athena, Posei­don and Mars. But where were the col­or­ful pic­ture books about Pele, Maui, Kaʻahu­pa­hau, Kama­puaʻa, the mene­hune? There weren’t any, not in the kidlit sec­tion of the library or in any of the illus­trat­ed clas­sics that lined my child­hood bookshelf. 

Lei and the Fire God­dess by Malia Mau­nakea is a rare gem in kid lit: an epic com­ing-of-age sto­ry writ­ten by a Native Hawai­ian author fea­tur­ing Native Hawai­ian char­ac­ters. The sto­ry intro­duces twelve year old Lei, who goes by her Eng­lish first name Anna, with all the snark­i­ness and inse­cu­ri­ty and joy that are part of grow­ing up. But it didn’t take long for me to get into the sto­ry. From the very moment she steps off that air­plane, Lei is a ful­ly devel­oped, ful­ly like­able character.