Kahinihini’ula ? The Red?Haired Boy of Kailua A Novel

Abstract

As an English major who grew up in Hawai‘i and who intends to continue her education with a Master’s degree in Secondary Education, I have noticed a shortage of Hawaiian literature for intermediate and high school readers. While children’s and adult literature have seen a rise in recent years, the majority of these works consists of picture books and/or textbook translations of legends from Hawaiian to English. Thus, the current corpus of Hawaiian literature seems to be either too complex or too rudimentary for intermediate and high school students. Inspired by this shortage of age?appropriate Hawaiian literature for adolescents, I was compelled to research and recount a selection of Hawaiian legends with a young adult audience in mind. The result of this endeavor has been the creation of the novel Kahinihini‘ula: the RedHaired Boy of Kailua. A primary goal of Kahinihini‘ula: the RedHaired Boy of Kailua has always been to recapture the essence of and preserve certain ancient Hawaiian mo?olelo, and the process that brought me to writing this novel, and choosing the particular legend to recount was a long one. First, I had to select one particular story out of hundreds and hundreds of mo?olelo that have been preserved over the years in song, chant, oral histories, and literature. This was a big hurdle in conducting research for this project, because with the vast number of resources available all conveying different, but equally important, aspects of Hawaiian culture, it was difficult to decide which mo?olelo would be most appropriate for a young adult audience.