Coming in from a very very prolonged lurking period.
I'm afraid I also did not connect too well with the characters in the story. Which is a shame, because I thought that it was really cool that the ancient Polynesian world was used as a setting. Hence this post.
So here's some trivia which might be of interest. Dave mentioned that the author was inspired after seeing the Vaka Moana exhibit. That is just way cool, because that exhibit reminded us of the vastness of the Oceanic world: 25,000 islands over the largest ocean in the world. Talk about the Polynesians being under-represented in fiction, of whatever genre.
There were, however, bits which don't really match up with Polynesian historical values. The gods, on one hand, were far from humanized, much less subject to the kind of personalized and emotional identities we get here. The ones in the story resemble something more out of the Greco-Roman pantheon; whereas Oceanic gods weren't "gods" in a sort of otherworldly sense, but more like multiple presences that could take different forms and were all but modeled on human personality.
Another detail, the whole family solidarity thing is a bit modernistic, in that the relations in the story resemble those of a contemporary nuclear family. In Polynesian culture it was a rather more extended set of lineage relations and roles which determined people's attitudes to various kin.
Finally, there is some emphasis on the star compass. One thing that is increasingly clear about Polynesian navigation is that it was not based on a system of absolute orientations (N, S, E, W, for instance), nor on a spherical notion of the sky, but rather on a combination of many different aspects of local environmental knowledge, of which the winds were more important than the stars.
Ok, huge post. But there you are. That's what happens when one returns after lurking for a couple of years.