Title:
Iris and the Aloha Wedding Adventure
Author:
Lynelle Woolley
Illustrator:
Karen Walcott
Publisher:
Markelle Media
Rating:
WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This is obviously one in a series (it follows Rosie and the Wedding Day Rescue and is succeeded by Starr and the High Seas Wedding Drama), and it’s a great idea to demonstrate cultures outside of your standard US mainstream, by showing wedding customs, although Hawaii really isn't that far out! I’d like to see this series stretch its legs, and hopefully it will. If there's one thing we get way too much of with children's and young adult novels it's that the USA is the only nation on Earth. It’s rather sad. But this series has the potential to go far and bring a lot back from its travels. I hope that's not an opportunity wasted.
The main character is Iris (all the characters in Iris's club seem to be named after flowers), and she is a member of Flower Girl World™ (FGW) along with friends Rosie And Starr, who were all flower girls at a wedding. I'm not going to get into the propriety of pulling up flowers to toss under the bride's feet at weddings. It's tempting to assume that these flowers were specially cultivated for that purpose, but it looks like the girls simply go grab them directly from flowers and trees growing wild. And am I going to mention the issue of flower girls vs. flower boys? So, moving right along…!
Iris learns she can be a flower girl once more, this time at a wedding in Hawaii, so six months later, off the family travels and Iris meets a new candidate for the FGW. Her name is Hana, which also is a word referencing a flower. Suspiciously convenient, huh?! Hana turns out to be my kind of girl: a real feisty handful of a tomboy, who tends to get very off-task if not closely supervised. She and Iris hatch a plan to catch a fairy known as a menehune, which they then hope to use to do the work of creating leis and other drudge-work for the wedding. They set up a box-trap primed with a cookie under a tree one night and the trap seems to work, but a fierce storm breaks out and they run indoors before they can find out what they caught!
The next day, the entire yard is trashed because of the storm, ruining all the work they'd done the previous day. A power outage also ruins the leis they made and the food they'd prepared, too. Since no storms were predicted, Hana and Iris think they caused all this by trapping the menehune (not that they ever saw what they trapped). Hana, Iris, and Leilani, Hana's older sister troop-off to pluck more blossoms. I have to say there's not much parental supervision going on here, and it badly backfires. Hana, of course, goes charging up the trees and crawling along ever thinner branches, eventually falling. Leilani tries to break her fall and ends up almost breaking her ankle in the process.
But in the end, things tend to work out, and Iris even gets to learn to hula dance. This story seems to me to be a little more 'fluffy' than I’d like, but then it's hardly aimed at me, and it does have some educational content, so with the caveat that I’d like to see this series stretch more and educate a bit more, and also be somewhat more inclusive of the male gender, I'm happy to rate this one as a worthy read. The grey-scale illustrations are charming and the tone upbeat. Like I said, I'd like a little bit more weight and a bit more of the culture in a story like this, but this one is a good start!
