Lei and the Fire Goddess

Lei and the Fire Goddess by Malia Maunakea is a myth-and-monsters adventure for 11 year olds about a girl who is embarrassed by her family's stories right up until the moment she needs them.

What happens

Anna is twelve. She lives in Colorado. Every summer she flies out to stay with her grandma, deep in the rainforest on Hawaii Island, because that was the deal her grandmother struck with her parents when Anna was too small to argue.

The job is to learn the stories. All of them. To be the one who remembers.

This year Anna has a plan to get out of it. Skip the family history. Go and do something touristy on the cheap. Come home with something she can actually mention at school.

You find out why very quickly, and it is a horribly familiar sort of moment. In a geology lesson her teacher asked why the Hawaiian islands sit in a line. Anna's hand shot up and she answered with the fire goddess Pele digging out a new crater to live in. The class laughed. Somebody coughed the word freak. Her best friend Ridley gave the tectonic plates answer and got a "precisely".

By lunchtime Ridley was at a different table. By the summer she was off to Paris with the girl who did the coughing.

So Anna has decided curses are not real. She says it to herself like a mantra. You can feel how hard she is working to believe it.

Which is the whole trouble, because the fire goddess is extremely real, and Anna manages to offend her. After that it is guardians, monsters and traps, and a girl who has spent a year hiding half of herself having to use it.

Her voice is what makes this. She is funny and a bit spiky. She winds her grandmother up by suggesting the neighbour should have offered shave ice to the snow goddess. She reads her dad's texts, which are entirely emojis, like a code. She also picks at the Ridley thing like a scab, which is exactly what you do at twelve.

Hawaiian words sit on the page without a fuss and you pick them up as you go. Her grandmother's pidgin is written as she speaks it.

If you have got a reader who has ever gone quiet about something at home because of how it would sound at school, this one is for them.

A word on how scary it gets. There is real peril here and the goddess is genuinely frightening, not cartoonish. A child who likes a proper chase will be delighted. A younger or more anxious reader might want it read alongside them.

What to read next

If they are after another kid whose mum's old stories turn out to be true, Momo Arashima Steals the Sword of the Wind does the same thing with Japanese myth. Momo gets teased for mixing up stories and real life, and then a death hag in a ball gown appears over her house.