Review: Tūī Street Legends

Tūī Street Legends is book three in Anne Kayes’ successful series about the (often magical) adventures of a group of young friends who live in a tightknit community where neighbours still greet each other by name and the kids are in and out of one another’s homes, forging close friendships and connections.

Throughout these books, Kayes expertly combines fairy tales, myths and legends from around the world, subtly showing how various cultures share versions of the same stories but shape them to fit local environments, circumstances and concerns. It’s fun to discuss with younger readers which ones are used to springboard into each story and how they are layered with Aotearoa’s own myths and legends as well as those found throughout the wider Pacific.

There is, of course, a complexity in this but Kayes handles it deftly and, by and large, delicately while also setting the stories – and putting her young protagonists – in contemporary situations where they meet head-on the challenges that confront many modern families.  She addresses issues like divorce and blended families, serious illness and the death of a parent, loneliness and old age, bullying and, in Tūī Street Legends, poverty and inequality.

It might be rather grim without the mythical backdrops and the magical realism which allow Kayes to bring enchantment, possibility and hope to the lives of her characters and, by extension, readers. The youngsters exercise a high degree of agency and when – if – it doesn’t work out can count on the support and understanding of older characters like parents, neighbours and teachers.  If only people in real life were able to communicate as constructively and calmly.

This successful combination of traditional and contemporary stops each of the books – the other two are Tūī Street Tales and Tūī Street Heroes – from being mere retellings of old stories, transforming them into something far fresher and relevant to young readers (the books are aimed at 8 – 12 year olds). Kayes has been recognised for this, with Tūī Street Tales winning the 2016 Storylines Tom Fitzgibbon Award and  Tūī Street Heroes becoming a 2020 Storylines Notable Book and a 2022 Whitcoulls Top 50 children’s book.

There are three stories in Tūī Street Legends. The first, The Hole in the Hedge, is premised around the Loch Ness Monster before sliding into stories about Aotearoa’s own mythical giant lizard, the kumi or ngārara. What is real and what is not? Do people see things the same way? What if they don’t? It centres on Tūī Street regular Ella who lives with her widowed dad, stepmother and two stepsisters. Trying to make sense of her new reality and grief about her mother’s death, Ella meets two foster children staying next door, Sal and younger brother Archie. It was good to see Kayes introducing a character like Archie, who appears to be neurodiverse, but he and Sal felt like a convenient backdrop to Ella’s own dilemmas and, once they had served their purpose, did not appear again.

I liked the second story, Bows and Arrows, best. The tale of Robin Hood and the moral dilemma that it raises – is it okay to steal from those who have more to give to those who don’t – is explored through Tim, one of Tūī Street’s more conservative characters.  He gets involved with setting up a pātaka kai (community food pantry) at school and is soon questioning whether breaking the law to help others is a sensible course of action. A highlight of this story was the character of Mary, an elderly and largely immobile woman who lets the Tūī Street kids pick and share the apples from her tree. It’s always good to see stereotypes overturned and Kayes does a brilliant job with Mary, who turns out not to be the sweet little old lady straight from central casting after all. 

The third and final story, The Way Home, picks up – more or less - from Tūī Street Heroes where twins Harry and Gemma faced off with their father’s new girlfriend, Lula, who embarked on a plan to take water from a natural spring thus desecrating the environment. In The Way Home, it becomes apparent that there is more to Lula than meets the eye and she gets a redemptive arc set against legends about creatures who change their form, like the selkies of Celtic and Norse mythology.

Like I said, it’s clever and thought-provoking stuff that canvases multiple viewpoints as seen through the eyes of a diverse range of lively characters. If there’s one overarching ‘moral’ to take away, it’s that we’re better when we attempt to find common-ground and work together because connection and community are vital.

While Tūī Street Legends could be read as a standalone book, I recommend reading the others first to bring more context and understanding to the alluring world Kayes creates.

Reviewed by Dionne Christian