Morgan’s instruction in High Tide in Hawaii is to build a ship. She doesn’t say what sort. She leaves a rhyme about a ship that rides waves both high and low, and that is the whole brief.<\/p>\n
Jack and Annie land in a palm tree above a village, on what turns out to be the top of a volcano. There is music somewhere below. Annie has gone off to dance before Jack has finished reading about how the islands were made.<\/p>\n
They meet Kama and Boka, who feed them poi with their fingers (Jack’s face gives him away, and the two of them tease him about it for the rest of the book), let them sleep on grass mats and promise to take them wave riding in the morning. Nobody in the village has ever heard of building a ship. Why would you sail away from here?<\/p>\n
So the middle of this one is really about Jack. He is the boy who wants to read about surfing before trying surfing. He stands up on his first wave, gets flattened, comes up spitting salt water, and then says something mean to Kama and Boka about not being able to read. It’s a small, horrible, completely recognisable moment and it isn’t smoothed over.<\/p>\n
Then the ground shakes.<\/p>\n
What makes the last third work is that the thing Jack was teased for is the thing that saves everybody. He looks up earthquakes. He reads what happens when the sea pulls back off the sand. Then he has to get past the breakers himself to warn the others, on the board he swore he’d never touch again.<\/p>\n
A gentle heads up. There is a tsunami in this book and it is described properly, with fish flopping on bare sand and a wall of water coming at a cliff. Everyone gets up the path in time and nobody is hurt, though the beach and the boards are gone. If your child has seen news of a real one, read those two chapters with them.<\/p>\n
The Hawaii here is a village in the distant past rather than anywhere you’d book a flight to. Tapa cloth beaten out of mulberry bark. Coconuts cracked open with a rock for breakfast. A hula that is less a dance than a way of telling what happened.<\/p>\n
This is the last of a run of four about kinds of magic, and the answer Morgan is fishing for is hiding in plain sight in something Kama’s mother says. Your reader will probably get there one beat before Jack does, which is a nice feeling to hand a seven year old.<\/p>\n
If the souvenirs on the tree house floor catch their eye, try Good Morning Gorillas. That’s where the twig came from, up a misty mountain, with Annie making friends in four seconds flat and Jack once again slightly to one side.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Morgan’s instruction in High Tide in Hawaii is to build a ship. She doesn’t say what sort. She leaves a rhyme about a ship that rides waves both high and low, and that is the whole brief. Jack and Annie land in a palm tree above a village, on what turns out to be the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11201,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":7536,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Good Morning Gorillas","lr_seo_hook":"Morgan says build a ship. Hawaii has surf, poi and no ships at all."},"book_tag":[1045],"age_group":[19],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[691],"class_list":["post-7664","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-adventure-books","age_group-books-for-7-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-mary-pope-osborne"],"yoast_title":"High Tide in Hawaii by Mary Pope Osborne | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Morgan says build a ship. Hawaii has surf, poi and no ships at all. For ages 7+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n