There’s much to enjoy about this novel from a first-time author, but it does have one serious flaw, which I will get to later. Alicia Upano was born and raised in Hawaiʻi, and that’s where her novel begins—specifically Hilo on the eastern coast. It concerns Jane, who is on a break from her studies and visiting her parents. While in a local bar and restaurant, she meets Kenji, someone she vaguely remembers from school. The pair get together, and a relationship sparks into life. As Jane prepares to return to her architectural course in Honolulu, Kenji makes an impromptu decision to go with her. Shortly after, a devastating tsunami—which newscasters are calling “the worst disaster in Hawaiʻi since Pearl Harbor”—hits Hilo. Kenji decides to return home to help with the rescue effort, while Jane remains. The novel’s chapters then alternate between Jane and Kenji’s points of view, with Upano’s best work coming in the sections featuring Kenji’s efforts to help make order out of chaos. Later, the narrative jumps forward several years and Jane and Kenji are thrown together once again. ‘Everything to the Sea’ aims to be a decade-spanning love story, but by its close, I really didn’t care if this feckless pair—who seem to wilfully withhold important information from each other for plot purposes only—fell in love or under a bus. It takes a deft hand for an author to make readers truly care about their protagonists (see Gabrielle Zevin’s ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ or anything by David Nicholls) and Upano isn’t quite there yet. RM

Published by 

Bloomsbury