mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

Eight-year-old Kahu is the descendant of a legendary Māori man who had the ability to communicate with whales. By birthright she should become chief of her people, but her grandfather believes only a boy is worthy to inherit, and he rejects all of Kahu's efforts to gain his attention and approval. When whales near Kahu's home begin behaving strangely, beaching themselves on purpose, it seems no one can help them—except the one person with the power to repair her people's broken bond with the creatures.

The book primarily alternates between two very different POVs. One is Kahu's uncle Rawiri, a young man who takes his people's traditions seriously, but is also a wanderer who feels drawn to experience life away from his homeland, spending years living in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The other is the ancient whale ridden by Kahu's ancestor, still alive and struggling to process the traumatic changes to the ocean environment and his own personal trauma of losing his connection to humans.

The whale chapters have an elevated, mythic resonance, which pairs well with Rawiri's more straightforward but still perceptive narration. It feels significant that Rawiri is readily accepting of his Māori cousins who have broken away from traditional gender roles (one is matter-of-factly described as "wearing a dress now") but he has no illusions of colonial culture being superior or without its own ways of cruelly cutting people's destinies short. The story isn't primarily about him, but we see a lot through his eyes, and he does have an arc of his own that adds perspective and insight.

Kahu is the central character of the book, but we don't get her direct POV until the climax of the story. To me this choice emphasizes that her unique way of seeing things is of the utmost importance, and that even the people who supported her all along don't realize the full gravity of that until it's almost too late. It does make her feel a bit more like a legendary figure herself rather than a regular kid, which I imagine is intentional.

This presentation of Kahu's character was a little surprising to me, maybe because I've come to expect that narratives about young people with special powers have at least some focus on how isolating their specialness is and how nobody ever asked them if they wanted to be the Chosen One and so on. But I never got a sense that Kahu has that kind of internal conflict. She wants her destiny, and the conflict is that her grandfather's sexism is standing in her way. She's not isolated, either, since most of her family are sympathetic to her situation, while her grandmother directly voices the opinion that her husband is full of crap and cites evidence in Māori legends of women who took on traditionally male roles when men were incapable or unavailable. So it's not like Kahu is a lone black sheep pitted against her whole family or whole culture; her experiences are more nuanced than that.

The book very intentionally evades genre categorization. It is stated overtly in the text that the events can't be called natural or supernatural, because they are both, and that's the point. I really liked that, and the book as a whole.

I haven't seen the movie. Maybe worth a watch?