An outsider sees no villains, no heroes

The view is always different from the outside. Even though author Julia Flynn Siler is a California resident, she isn’t from Napa, so when she wrote the best-selling wine-industry history "The House of Mondavi," Valley vintners criticized her outside-looking-in perspective.

And so, when Siler began researching the era of Hawaii’s overthrow, she was warned repeatedly that a Californian digging through Hawaiian history might stir up an angry hornets’ nest.

But her fascination with the subject drove her on. Her new work is titled "Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings and America’s First Imperial Adventure."

"I kind of came at it backwards," she said by phone from Northern California. "There is a tie between our two places, and it is Claus Spreckels, the ‘Sugar King.’ And so, as I researched, it became the story of two families, the Spreckels and the Hawaiian royal families, and what happened in that interesting period. By not having a predisposed point of view, I didn’t have an emotional investment in the characters. Well, not at first."

Knowing little but the outlines of the story before she started, Siler expected to be surprised by what she was learning. "There were no clear-cut villains and no absolute heroes," she said.

"I was also surprised and delighted by the level of data in the Hawaii state archives and in Bishop Museum. Wonderful stuff. (The quality of the materials there) made me think about what historians would think about our age. Would they be reading our text messages? Because some of the best illuminations about the texture of the times came to light in the preserved letters."

Liliuokalani’s writings showed the queen as "certainly a complex character. … We’re all a bundle of contradictions, after all. I hadn’t expected her to be so respectful of British aristocracy, for example, such a fan of Queen Victoria. And then she’d be upset with her husband and scold him in letters. It made her a real person and also an extraordinarily inspiring one."

These surviving letters became a valuable resource, as the queen seemed to be writing for the ages.

"Oh, she was clearly, intelligently aware that anything she put into words would be read and scrutinized in the future. She has this consciousness that she was living in a very vulnerable state, in terms of historical interpretation, and she was creating a complex story so others could build on that."

While the story of Hawaii’s overthrow and plantation economy are common knowledge in the islands, it isn’t elsewhere, Siler said. Her goal was to write a popular, not scholarly, history that would give readers an accurate idea of the spirit of the time and the unfolding of events.

"The primary works for most people are Michener’s ‘Hawaii’ novel and Daws’ ‘Shoal of Time,’ and neither of these are new books. There has been a lot of research since — the Hawaiian Renaissance occurred since — and there’s new source material to draw on."

Feedback has so far been positive, not just for Siler’s scholarship, but for her crisp prose.

"I do get the usual questions about why I did it, and who am I to speak for anybody?" said Siler. "It’s a fundamental issue — who has the rights to history?"