Everything to the Sea by Alicia Upano

Everything to the Sea is a tender and emotionally turbulent debut from Hawaiian writer Alicia Upano about love, grief and the long work of rebuilding after catastrophe. Set partly in Hilo, Hawai‘i, the novel follows Jane and Kenji, two young people whose summer romance begins with the intensity and carelessness of youth. Jane has come home before her final year of college, planning to save money and then leave the island behind. Kenji, a local boy who knows her as Janie, quickly unsettles that plan. Their connection is immediate, consuming and fragile.

Then a tsunami devastates their town and takes their families, rupturing not only the landscape but the future Jane and Kenji had imagined, however briefly, together. In the aftermath, they respond to loss in opposite ways. Kenji remains in Hawai‘i, bound to the work of repair and to the community that has been broken open. Jane leaves for California, seeking distance from the place where grief has become inseparable from memory. For seven years, the ocean between them becomes both separation and unfinished business.

The tsunami’s destruction is physical, but the novel is equally interested in its quieter consequences: altered loyalties, survivor’s guilt, the burden of staying, the shame of leaving, and the way a single event can redirect several lives at once. The best passages recognise that rebuilding a town and rebuilding a self are related tasks, though not the same one. Something that other writers sometimes conflate or complicate.

Jane and Kenji are deliberately imperfect protagonists. Their decisions can be frustrating, especially as years of miscommunication and retreat accumulate, but Upano gives those failures emotional logic. Trauma does not make either character wise. It makes them defensive, impulsive and sometimes ungenerous. This is where the novel finds much of its credibility. Their love matters, but it is not allowed to solve everything it touches.

That said, the marketing of the book as a love story may slightly misdirect readers. The romance is central, yet the novel’s deeper power lies in its treatment of grief, community and displacement. Because Jane and Kenji’s bond forms so quickly in the opening movement, some readers may find the force of their continuing attachment easier to understand intellectually than to feel immediately. The later sections, where loss has complicated them both, are often more persuasive than the first flush of desire.

Upano’s prose is fluid and atmospheric, attentive to water, heat, bodies, buildings and silence. She writes with confidence about young adulthood as a period of self-invention, but also about the limits of reinvention when the past has not been mourned properly. Everything to the Sea is an accomplished debut, moving not because it insists on the endurance of love, but because it understands how much can be swept away before anyone learns what remains.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Bloomsbury