ADVENTURES OF MUKU

The menehunes of Hawaiian folklore seem especially prone to inept and ill-conceived fictionalization. Nicholson's major innovation is the invention of Muku, the tiny son of a chief whose first five children were girls--a condition so dreadful that the fourth had to be turned into a mynah bird and the fifth into a turtle. It is these two transformed princesses who save their tribe in the end and watch over their little brother in the interim, through a series of adventures which draw freely from traditional lore but which are artificially dramatized in a dull, diffuse manner that slows the action and would never survive in any culture's oral tradition.