Debutiful

What happens when one day, one impulsive decision, one declined call is what defines the rest of your life? Alicia Upano‘s debut is a love story, it’s a natural disaster novel, and most of all, it’s a haunting reckoning with the many ways that the people and places we come from stay with us, even as, in the case of Everything to the Sea, they have been swept out to sea.

Following Jane and Kenji from the summer fling of their early twenties, unable to withstand the destruction of their hometown, the novel takes us from the Island of Hawai’i, to O’ahu, to San Francisco, where, years later, the two reconnect as Jane works as an architect and Kenji curates an art exhibit on the tsunami that upended their lives. Upano captures the messiness of first love, the comfort and claustrophobia found in the social ecosystem of island life, and, in spite of how her characters misunderstand each other, finds a way to bring them back to each other, and to the land that made them.

There is a specific comfort in reading a book written to and from the places and people you love most, of seeing the language found in the mouths of your childhood, the smells of the places that raised you, on the page. Everything to the Sea reminds us that even in our worst moments, in the times we are most lost, there are people who are willing, who want, to love us. It took me home. I hope it does the same for you.