From the award-winning author of Hula, a dazzling saga that moves from Hawaii to California and back, about the generations of women tasked with protecting the history and place that made them.A young woman lies in a hospital bed in a coma, watched over by her estranged grandmother. Some say she jumped off the cliff; others say she was swept away by a wave. But her tutu at her bedside suspects something else is wrong, that the reason for the hardship and heartbreak in their family history is tied to a story that she's never told--one about a powerful stone, the pohaku, that her family was tasked with protecting generations ago. In fits and starts, the grandmother begins . . .We travel back in time to the eighteenth century, when the explorer James Cook becomes the first European to visit the Hawaiian Islands. Cook arrives in pursuit of an ancient prophecy, a key that would unlock the mysteries of the world, but he is killed before he can learn about the mysterious stone--a stone born a
