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Everything to the Sea
Part riveting love story, part coming-of-age tale, Everything to the Sea is a breathtaking debut novel spanning years and shores after a sudden tsunami devastates the island of Hawai’i and cuts short a young couple’s budding romance—a deeply moving testament to the catastrophes love can endure.
This is how the story goes: Jane will fall in love. And then all of this will vanish.
Home for one final summer, Jane is working and saving cash for her senior year of college before she leaves her island town behind forever. At first, she doesn’t remember Kenji, but he quickly becomes someone she can’t forget: square jaw, a dimple in his cheek. A Hilo boy. To Kenji, she’s Janie, nose perpetually buried in her old high school sketchbooks. Jane tells herself it’s only a fling—one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent.
Then a tsunami sweeps their families out to sea, and their all-consuming affair breaks with the weight of grief, pulling them in opposite directions. Kenji remains in Hawai’i, bound by duty to rebuild their hometown. Jane, shattered by the loss, follows her best friend to California. For seven years, an ocean lies between them, until Jane and Kenji meet on another coast . . .
In prose that sparkles like sun on the water, Upano’s debut novel tells the unforgettable story of two young people as they come of age, fall in love, forge new families, and try to find their way back together, again and again. Everything to the Sea is a moving portrait of our ability to overcome even the most devastating tragedies, when everything else is washed away.
This is how the story goes: Jane will fall in love. And then all of this will vanish.
Home for one final summer, Jane is working and saving cash for her senior year of college before she leaves her island town behind forever. At first, she doesn’t remember Kenji, but he quickly becomes someone she can’t forget: square jaw, a dimple in his cheek. A Hilo boy. To Kenji, she’s Janie, nose perpetually buried in her old high school sketchbooks. Jane tells herself it’s only a fling—one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent.
Then a tsunami sweeps their families out to sea, and their all-consuming affair breaks with the weight of grief, pulling them in opposite directions. Kenji remains in Hawai’i, bound by duty to rebuild their hometown. Jane, shattered by the loss, follows her best friend to California. For seven years, an ocean lies between them, until Jane and Kenji meet on another coast . . .
In prose that sparkles like sun on the water, Upano’s debut novel tells the unforgettable story of two young people as they come of age, fall in love, forge new families, and try to find their way back together, again and again. Everything to the Sea is a moving portrait of our ability to overcome even the most devastating tragedies, when everything else is washed away.
Unknown Binding
Expected publication July 14, 2026
163 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 9, 2025
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Love can feel like a tsunami. It often begins quietly, beneath the surface, but when it reaches you, it is undeniable. It permanently alters and reshapes who you are, leaving lasting imprints and reconfiguring your internal map. It’s an astonishing display of beauty and might, unable to be controlled, but only responded to.
This is why it was such an apt analogy, and it perfectly encapsulated the relationship between Kenji and Jane. This book was really good. It took a unique angle on the “love that withstands the test of time” trope and made it feel fresh. I loved the setting, and although their behavior drove me crazy at times, I understood the push and pull nature of their enduring love. Timing is often everything in matters of the heart, and following these two through the years as they pursued and retreated felt familiar, poignant, and heartbreaking.
What a great debut from Upano. I’ll be looking forward to more from her in the future.
Love can feel like a tsunami. It often begins quietly, beneath the surface, but when it reaches you, it is undeniable. It permanently alters and reshapes who you are, leaving lasting imprints and reconfiguring your internal map. It’s an astonishing display of beauty and might, unable to be controlled, but only responded to.
This is why it was such an apt analogy, and it perfectly encapsulated the relationship between Kenji and Jane. This book was really good. It took a unique angle on the “love that withstands the test of time” trope and made it feel fresh. I loved the setting, and although their behavior drove me crazy at times, I understood the push and pull nature of their enduring love. Timing is often everything in matters of the heart, and following these two through the years as they pursued and retreated felt familiar, poignant, and heartbreaking.
What a great debut from Upano. I’ll be looking forward to more from her in the future.
October 28, 2025
this is the kind of book that reminds me why i love reading so much. i was captivated by every single page. such a beautiful story that perfectly depicts loss, grief, healing, and rebuilding everything from scratch, including yourself. this is an unforgettable love story but more than anything, a tale of the strength it takes to carry on living after so much pain. alice upano is a painter of world building and layered characters, truly an incredible storyteller. grateful that i got to read this! i will carry these characters in my heart, i cried countless times.
January 16, 2026
This book beautifully tragic. A small Hawaiian Island is faced with unimaginable challenges when a tsunami hits and destroys the community. Homes lost, families destroyed, and people are swept away without a trace. The book follows two young adults paths through post-tsunami life. One chooses to stay and fix the island while the other—after losing everything—starts anew on the mainland. Set in the context of a love story, the tsunami draws striking parallels to first loves, loss, and the struggles of finding oneself.
I HIGHLY recommend!
Also, this book was provided to me as an advanced readers copy via NetGallery in exchange for an honest review.
I HIGHLY recommend!
Also, this book was provided to me as an advanced readers copy via NetGallery in exchange for an honest review.
January 5, 2026
Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read this book before its release!
There are a lot of things I liked about this book, and a few things that weren’t quite up my alley. In the end it’s certainly a heart-wrenching story about a place and a people whose voices need more amplification. The writing style just wasn’t my cup of tea and some of the character development felt forced.
As a debut novel, this was a great effort and I would certainly read more of the author’s future work.
There are a lot of things I liked about this book, and a few things that weren’t quite up my alley. In the end it’s certainly a heart-wrenching story about a place and a people whose voices need more amplification. The writing style just wasn’t my cup of tea and some of the character development felt forced.
As a debut novel, this was a great effort and I would certainly read more of the author’s future work.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
In Alicia Upano’s debut novel “Everything to the Sea,” catastrophe is not an interruption to life so much as a revelation of what life has always been: provisional, communal, haunted by paperwork and weather, stitched together by food, favors, and the ordinary bravery of showing up again. The book’s central event is a modern-day tsunami that remakes a fictionalized Hilo, Hawai‘i, and scatters the lives of its survivors into new geometries of love and obligation. But Upano is not especially interested in spectacle. Her wave is less a set piece than a moral climate – an atmosphere that lingers long after the water recedes, soaking into property lines, family systems, the gut’s reflexes, the mind’s looping counterfactuals.
The novel’s formal conceit is the quiet kind that feels inevitable once you’ve encountered it: a four-part structure borrowed from the Pacific Tsunami Museum’s language of “Initiation,” “Split,” “Amplification,” and “Run-Up.” It’s a clever scaffold, yes, but more importantly it becomes an ethic. The book is always asking what it means to name the phases of disaster as if they were stages in a romance or a life – as if grief could be diagrammed, as if the body could be persuaded by vocabulary. That tension, between the human urge to impose narrative and the ocean’s indifference to our plots, gives “Everything to the Sea” its steady undertow.
Upano begins in brightness, the kind that already contains its own shadow. Jane Ito, an aspiring architect with a sketchbook’s sense of control, meets Kenji Lee in Hilo with the charged inevitability of two local children who are old enough to think they’ve invented their own freedom. Their early chapters are humid with longing and foreshadowing: storms rolling in, a coastline that looks calm because it is not yet moving. Jane’s hunger is for elsewhere – for the continent, for ambition with measurable returns. Kenji’s hunger is harder to name: he wants to be good, to be useful, to be chosen. They fall into each other with the ease of youth and the slight panic of those who can sense time tightening.
Then the wave comes, and the novel’s emotional temperature changes. What is extraordinary about Upano’s tsunami is how quickly it becomes ordinary – not because the destruction is small, but because survival is a machine that starts running regardless of whether the psyche is ready. People queue. People register. People sleep in rows. People argue over socks and underwear and who gets to charge their phone first. Trauma arrives not only as terror but as logistics. In this, Upano joins a lineage of disaster writing that prefers the granular truth to the cinematic one: not the grand aerial shot, but the cot, the list, the smell of disinfectant, the unbearable intimacy of being alive among strangers. Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell” hovers nearby, as do the more solitary devastations of Sonali Deraniyagala’s “Wave” and Richard Lloyd Parry’s “Ghosts of the Tsunami,” but Upano’s emphasis is distinct: the community is not a backdrop for individual transformation. It is the protagonist.
Kenji’s post-wave arc is among the novel’s most finely observed. He becomes a builder in the broadest sense – assembling shelter, assembling a found family, assembling meaning out of wreckage and guilt. He takes in Logan, a boy teetering on the edge of becoming the kind of young man who confuses numbness for strength, and in doing so Kenji makes a choice that feels both altruistic and desperate: if he can keep someone else from falling apart, perhaps he can postpone his own collapse. His relationships with Loralei – fierce, corrective, tender in her own unsentimental way – and with the wider town are drawn with a realism that resists the easy halo we sometimes give “good” men. Kenji’s goodness is a muscle, and like any muscle it can cramp. It can become its own trap.
Jane, meanwhile, becomes a study in the particular shame of the survivor who fled. She ends up in California, professionally successful enough to tell herself she has made the correct choice, and emotionally stranded enough to know she is lying. Upano writes Jane’s ambition without contempt and her escape without absolution. It’s a difficult balance, especially now, when so many contemporary novels flatten their characters into either victims of systems or heroes of self-actualization. Jane is neither. She is simply a person shaped by loss and by the long American catechism that says leaving is the same thing as winning.
What brings Jane back is not epiphany but complication: a landslide, an estate, a town that has continued without her. One of the book’s finest sequences – precise, funny, charged with submerged history – unfolds in a Walmart at 11 p.m., where Kenji, in search of domestic fixtures and anonymity, collides with Jane under fluorescent light. The setting is perfect: the ease of sameness, the violence of being seen. Their encounter is not romantic; it is corrosive. Kenji is sharp in a way that surprises even him, using competence and local knowledge as a weapon. Jane, used to intellectual mastery, is forced into a humiliating kind of beginnerhood: the lot needs more than a cheap trimmer, and she needs more than an apology.
Upano understands that repair is not a single act but a series of humiliations willingly endured. Jane tries, badly, to clear her parents’ lot, then must accept help from Maile and Wally-Jun – later Walter – whose generosity is of the older, local kind: not performative, not transactional, sometimes overbearing, always rooted in the assumption that survival obligates you to others. Maile’s counsel, that helping and accepting help are both forms of doing right, carries the weight of lived philosophy rather than authorial lesson. It is also one of the book’s most contemporary arguments. In an age of burnout and “self-care” commodified into solitude, “Everything to the Sea” insists on mutual aid as not only ethical but necessary – a truth freshly legible after pandemic years, after wildfire seasons, after the televised recursion of disaster that has made so many Americans fluent in other people’s emergencies.
If “Everything to the Sea” has a set piece, it is the museum exhibit Kenji curates, titled “Aftershock.” This is where Upano’s thematic ambitions risk tipping into neatness – an exhibit that contains the town’s story in installations titled Before, Shelter, Missing, and more, as if grief could be curated into stages and lighting cues. And yet the sequence works, largely because Upano allows it to be messy. Jane panics. She knocks over urns. She is ashamed in public. The exhibit is not a museum of catharsis; it is a room full of triggers. It also becomes a place where the novel’s private drama is confronted by a larger claim: the town’s story does not belong to Jane and Kenji. Their romance is only one thread in a fabric made of many losses, many repairs.
That larger claim is where Upano’s writing shows its most distinctive DNA. Her sentences often move like tide and breath: sensuous but controlled, attentive to the material world – vine, wood, sweat, rust – while carrying metaphysical pressure underneath. She is especially good at the way objects become talismans without becoming symbols in the crude, school-assignment sense. The orange mug that once belonged to Jane’s father, washed up after the tsunami, travels through the book like a small, stubborn remainder: grief made portable. So do lei – pikake, maile, hilo – worn at moments of visibility, as if the body must be braided into something ceremonial to withstand being looked at. Even the Hawaiian lunar calendar enters not as exotic texture but as worldview: the “hoku ili,” the moon stranded between night and day, is a gorgeous image for the novel’s emotional condition, its characters caught between who they were and what happened.
Still, the book’s most powerful turn is not aesthetic but ethical. Upano refuses to let rebuilding be purely sentimental. She writes development, land, and housing as contested terrain – because it is. Outsiders buy lots. “Monster houses” threaten the neighborhood’s character and access. A church garden that feeds families becomes fenced off, food rotting behind chain link while a camera watches. These are not plot ornaments; they are the afterlife of disaster, the slow violence that follows the fast one. In this sense the novel sits comfortably beside recent climate- and community-conscious fiction like “The Light Pirate,” and it shares something of “Station Eleven’s” preoccupation with art after ruin, though Upano’s sensibility is less mythic, more municipal. Her book knows how budgets work. It knows how nonprofits run out of grants. It knows how relief becomes a bureaucracy, and how goodwill, without systems, can expire.
It also knows that disaster does not erase prior harm; it rearranges it. Kenji’s eventual decision to fly to Honolulu on Christmas Eve to visit his incarcerated father is one of the novel’s most startling and quietly brave choices. The prison visitor center – windowless, disinfectant-sharp, full of families in holiday pajamas – echoes the shelter in Hilo without equating the two. Kenji’s confrontation with the man who beat his mother is not redemptive, exactly. It is an accounting. Upano does not offer the false comfort of a clean apology. Instead she gives something harder and truer: the sense that forgiveness, when it happens, is less about excusing the past than about freeing the future from being solely a reaction to it. In the landscape of contemporary fiction, where the moral arc often bends toward either righteous severance or easy reconciliation, Upano charts a third path: contact without illusion.
By the time Jane’s five-day trip becomes a month, and then becomes a life, the novel has shifted from romance to something more interesting: the story of a woman learning that staying is not stagnation but courage. Jane swims not for time but endurance. She learns to hold her grief in ritual – coffee poured for the dead, flowers placed where the living once stood. She begins designing again, not as escape but as service: a pro bono tithe of craft to neighborhood continuity. The reveal that WMW Properties is Walter–Maile–Walter – Wally-Jun’s familial corporate joke turned community investment – is both funny and moving, and it crystallizes what the book believes about wealth: not that it corrupts inevitably, but that in a small town it can be treated as responsibility, a way of buying land back from predation.
The novel’s final stretch, set around Christmas and New Year’s, could have collapsed into wish fulfillment. Upano avoids that by keeping desire tethered to time. Jane and Kenji do not simply reunite; they begin again, slowly, in a mode that feels almost old-fashioned: postcards, distance as a channel rather than a wound. Their reconciliation is not framed as destiny but as choice – a decision to risk disappointment for the sake of something worth building. The New Year’s fireworks sequence at Walter’s restaurant – the one hundred thousand firecrackers, the adopted-and-adapted traditions, the sea and gunpowder and communal noise – is both celebratory and sobering. The world is loud with survival. Love, Upano suggests, is the quieter gamble underneath.
As a critic, one looks for what a book believes about the world, because style is finally a form of belief. “Everything to the Sea” believes that grief is not private property. It believes that community is not a vibe but labor – attendance, revision, sweat. It believes that in an era when we are inundated by images of catastrophe – floods, fires, earthquakes, wars – the moral question is not whether we can bear to watch, but what we do with what we’ve seen. Do we let it turn us into spectators of our own lives, fluent in outrage and poor at care? Or do we accept the less glamorous work of rebuilding: zoning meetings, compost heaps, contractor-grade trash bags, the awkward humility of asking for help?
There are places where Upano’s control shows – moments when the architecture of the novel, like Jane’s imagined structures, is almost too clean, too elegantly stressed for the messiness it contains. Kenji’s interiority can remain deliberately occluded, and a few late scenes risk the polish of earned wisdom arriving on schedule. But these are not failures so much as the marks of a writer whose instincts bend toward coherence – and who has, in a debut, already mastered a great deal of it.
To read “Everything to the Sea” in 2026 is to feel how intimately it speaks to our present without ever naming it directly. The story’s wave is fictional, but its atmosphere is familiar: a world where disasters arrive faster than institutions can respond, where housing and land become moral battlegrounds, where mutual aid is both salvation and exhaustion, where the future feels increasingly like a series of “aftershocks.” Upano’s accomplishment is to hold that contemporary dread in one hand and, in the other, a stubborn tenderness – not sentimental, not naïve, but practiced. Her characters do not “heal” so much as learn to live truthfully inside what happened, and to love anyway.
That is why this novel earns an 89 out of 100: because it is emotionally exacting, formally intelligent, and uncommonly wise about the relationship between private longing and public catastrophe. It offers a love story that does not pretend love is enough, and a disaster story that does not pretend disaster is the end. What remains, after the water, is the work – and the strange grace of choosing it.
The novel’s formal conceit is the quiet kind that feels inevitable once you’ve encountered it: a four-part structure borrowed from the Pacific Tsunami Museum’s language of “Initiation,” “Split,” “Amplification,” and “Run-Up.” It’s a clever scaffold, yes, but more importantly it becomes an ethic. The book is always asking what it means to name the phases of disaster as if they were stages in a romance or a life – as if grief could be diagrammed, as if the body could be persuaded by vocabulary. That tension, between the human urge to impose narrative and the ocean’s indifference to our plots, gives “Everything to the Sea” its steady undertow.
Upano begins in brightness, the kind that already contains its own shadow. Jane Ito, an aspiring architect with a sketchbook’s sense of control, meets Kenji Lee in Hilo with the charged inevitability of two local children who are old enough to think they’ve invented their own freedom. Their early chapters are humid with longing and foreshadowing: storms rolling in, a coastline that looks calm because it is not yet moving. Jane’s hunger is for elsewhere – for the continent, for ambition with measurable returns. Kenji’s hunger is harder to name: he wants to be good, to be useful, to be chosen. They fall into each other with the ease of youth and the slight panic of those who can sense time tightening.
Then the wave comes, and the novel’s emotional temperature changes. What is extraordinary about Upano’s tsunami is how quickly it becomes ordinary – not because the destruction is small, but because survival is a machine that starts running regardless of whether the psyche is ready. People queue. People register. People sleep in rows. People argue over socks and underwear and who gets to charge their phone first. Trauma arrives not only as terror but as logistics. In this, Upano joins a lineage of disaster writing that prefers the granular truth to the cinematic one: not the grand aerial shot, but the cot, the list, the smell of disinfectant, the unbearable intimacy of being alive among strangers. Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell” hovers nearby, as do the more solitary devastations of Sonali Deraniyagala’s “Wave” and Richard Lloyd Parry’s “Ghosts of the Tsunami,” but Upano’s emphasis is distinct: the community is not a backdrop for individual transformation. It is the protagonist.
Kenji’s post-wave arc is among the novel’s most finely observed. He becomes a builder in the broadest sense – assembling shelter, assembling a found family, assembling meaning out of wreckage and guilt. He takes in Logan, a boy teetering on the edge of becoming the kind of young man who confuses numbness for strength, and in doing so Kenji makes a choice that feels both altruistic and desperate: if he can keep someone else from falling apart, perhaps he can postpone his own collapse. His relationships with Loralei – fierce, corrective, tender in her own unsentimental way – and with the wider town are drawn with a realism that resists the easy halo we sometimes give “good” men. Kenji’s goodness is a muscle, and like any muscle it can cramp. It can become its own trap.
Jane, meanwhile, becomes a study in the particular shame of the survivor who fled. She ends up in California, professionally successful enough to tell herself she has made the correct choice, and emotionally stranded enough to know she is lying. Upano writes Jane’s ambition without contempt and her escape without absolution. It’s a difficult balance, especially now, when so many contemporary novels flatten their characters into either victims of systems or heroes of self-actualization. Jane is neither. She is simply a person shaped by loss and by the long American catechism that says leaving is the same thing as winning.
What brings Jane back is not epiphany but complication: a landslide, an estate, a town that has continued without her. One of the book’s finest sequences – precise, funny, charged with submerged history – unfolds in a Walmart at 11 p.m., where Kenji, in search of domestic fixtures and anonymity, collides with Jane under fluorescent light. The setting is perfect: the ease of sameness, the violence of being seen. Their encounter is not romantic; it is corrosive. Kenji is sharp in a way that surprises even him, using competence and local knowledge as a weapon. Jane, used to intellectual mastery, is forced into a humiliating kind of beginnerhood: the lot needs more than a cheap trimmer, and she needs more than an apology.
Upano understands that repair is not a single act but a series of humiliations willingly endured. Jane tries, badly, to clear her parents’ lot, then must accept help from Maile and Wally-Jun – later Walter – whose generosity is of the older, local kind: not performative, not transactional, sometimes overbearing, always rooted in the assumption that survival obligates you to others. Maile’s counsel, that helping and accepting help are both forms of doing right, carries the weight of lived philosophy rather than authorial lesson. It is also one of the book’s most contemporary arguments. In an age of burnout and “self-care” commodified into solitude, “Everything to the Sea” insists on mutual aid as not only ethical but necessary – a truth freshly legible after pandemic years, after wildfire seasons, after the televised recursion of disaster that has made so many Americans fluent in other people’s emergencies.
If “Everything to the Sea” has a set piece, it is the museum exhibit Kenji curates, titled “Aftershock.” This is where Upano’s thematic ambitions risk tipping into neatness – an exhibit that contains the town’s story in installations titled Before, Shelter, Missing, and more, as if grief could be curated into stages and lighting cues. And yet the sequence works, largely because Upano allows it to be messy. Jane panics. She knocks over urns. She is ashamed in public. The exhibit is not a museum of catharsis; it is a room full of triggers. It also becomes a place where the novel’s private drama is confronted by a larger claim: the town’s story does not belong to Jane and Kenji. Their romance is only one thread in a fabric made of many losses, many repairs.
That larger claim is where Upano’s writing shows its most distinctive DNA. Her sentences often move like tide and breath: sensuous but controlled, attentive to the material world – vine, wood, sweat, rust – while carrying metaphysical pressure underneath. She is especially good at the way objects become talismans without becoming symbols in the crude, school-assignment sense. The orange mug that once belonged to Jane’s father, washed up after the tsunami, travels through the book like a small, stubborn remainder: grief made portable. So do lei – pikake, maile, hilo – worn at moments of visibility, as if the body must be braided into something ceremonial to withstand being looked at. Even the Hawaiian lunar calendar enters not as exotic texture but as worldview: the “hoku ili,” the moon stranded between night and day, is a gorgeous image for the novel’s emotional condition, its characters caught between who they were and what happened.
Still, the book’s most powerful turn is not aesthetic but ethical. Upano refuses to let rebuilding be purely sentimental. She writes development, land, and housing as contested terrain – because it is. Outsiders buy lots. “Monster houses” threaten the neighborhood’s character and access. A church garden that feeds families becomes fenced off, food rotting behind chain link while a camera watches. These are not plot ornaments; they are the afterlife of disaster, the slow violence that follows the fast one. In this sense the novel sits comfortably beside recent climate- and community-conscious fiction like “The Light Pirate,” and it shares something of “Station Eleven’s” preoccupation with art after ruin, though Upano’s sensibility is less mythic, more municipal. Her book knows how budgets work. It knows how nonprofits run out of grants. It knows how relief becomes a bureaucracy, and how goodwill, without systems, can expire.
It also knows that disaster does not erase prior harm; it rearranges it. Kenji’s eventual decision to fly to Honolulu on Christmas Eve to visit his incarcerated father is one of the novel’s most startling and quietly brave choices. The prison visitor center – windowless, disinfectant-sharp, full of families in holiday pajamas – echoes the shelter in Hilo without equating the two. Kenji’s confrontation with the man who beat his mother is not redemptive, exactly. It is an accounting. Upano does not offer the false comfort of a clean apology. Instead she gives something harder and truer: the sense that forgiveness, when it happens, is less about excusing the past than about freeing the future from being solely a reaction to it. In the landscape of contemporary fiction, where the moral arc often bends toward either righteous severance or easy reconciliation, Upano charts a third path: contact without illusion.
By the time Jane’s five-day trip becomes a month, and then becomes a life, the novel has shifted from romance to something more interesting: the story of a woman learning that staying is not stagnation but courage. Jane swims not for time but endurance. She learns to hold her grief in ritual – coffee poured for the dead, flowers placed where the living once stood. She begins designing again, not as escape but as service: a pro bono tithe of craft to neighborhood continuity. The reveal that WMW Properties is Walter–Maile–Walter – Wally-Jun’s familial corporate joke turned community investment – is both funny and moving, and it crystallizes what the book believes about wealth: not that it corrupts inevitably, but that in a small town it can be treated as responsibility, a way of buying land back from predation.
The novel’s final stretch, set around Christmas and New Year’s, could have collapsed into wish fulfillment. Upano avoids that by keeping desire tethered to time. Jane and Kenji do not simply reunite; they begin again, slowly, in a mode that feels almost old-fashioned: postcards, distance as a channel rather than a wound. Their reconciliation is not framed as destiny but as choice – a decision to risk disappointment for the sake of something worth building. The New Year’s fireworks sequence at Walter’s restaurant – the one hundred thousand firecrackers, the adopted-and-adapted traditions, the sea and gunpowder and communal noise – is both celebratory and sobering. The world is loud with survival. Love, Upano suggests, is the quieter gamble underneath.
As a critic, one looks for what a book believes about the world, because style is finally a form of belief. “Everything to the Sea” believes that grief is not private property. It believes that community is not a vibe but labor – attendance, revision, sweat. It believes that in an era when we are inundated by images of catastrophe – floods, fires, earthquakes, wars – the moral question is not whether we can bear to watch, but what we do with what we’ve seen. Do we let it turn us into spectators of our own lives, fluent in outrage and poor at care? Or do we accept the less glamorous work of rebuilding: zoning meetings, compost heaps, contractor-grade trash bags, the awkward humility of asking for help?
There are places where Upano’s control shows – moments when the architecture of the novel, like Jane’s imagined structures, is almost too clean, too elegantly stressed for the messiness it contains. Kenji’s interiority can remain deliberately occluded, and a few late scenes risk the polish of earned wisdom arriving on schedule. But these are not failures so much as the marks of a writer whose instincts bend toward coherence – and who has, in a debut, already mastered a great deal of it.
To read “Everything to the Sea” in 2026 is to feel how intimately it speaks to our present without ever naming it directly. The story’s wave is fictional, but its atmosphere is familiar: a world where disasters arrive faster than institutions can respond, where housing and land become moral battlegrounds, where mutual aid is both salvation and exhaustion, where the future feels increasingly like a series of “aftershocks.” Upano’s accomplishment is to hold that contemporary dread in one hand and, in the other, a stubborn tenderness – not sentimental, not naïve, but practiced. Her characters do not “heal” so much as learn to live truthfully inside what happened, and to love anyway.
That is why this novel earns an 89 out of 100: because it is emotionally exacting, formally intelligent, and uncommonly wise about the relationship between private longing and public catastrophe. It offers a love story that does not pretend love is enough, and a disaster story that does not pretend disaster is the end. What remains, after the water, is the work – and the strange grace of choosing it.
November 30, 2025
“Everything to the Sea” is a beautiful story about love, loss, grief, family, community, and forgiveness—a profound exploration of losing yourself and finding yourself again. This emotional and poetic book captures how people navigate the aftermath of tragedy, examining the choices we make and the hope that love and faith can lead us home to ourselves.
Thank you to Netgalley for the eArc
Thank you to Netgalley for the eArc
November 20, 2025
Despite the book blurb, I was unprepared for how deeply emotional and intensely felt every piece of Everything to the Sea would be.
Upano captures the nuances of the differing perspectives/approaches to life for folks who grew up in a small town and couples that with the intense and merciless reality of natural disasters. Every emotion was conveyed in the most visceral of ways, and had me near tears—and I'm not even an emotional reader! I truly felt that this was so well-crafted and beautiful, honoring the whole spectrum of what one might feel if they survived such a disaster, even the feelings we don't want to acknowledge. Definitely recommend for anyone who is looking for a book that promises hope, even when it feels like there's nothing left in the world.
Upano captures the nuances of the differing perspectives/approaches to life for folks who grew up in a small town and couples that with the intense and merciless reality of natural disasters. Every emotion was conveyed in the most visceral of ways, and had me near tears—and I'm not even an emotional reader! I truly felt that this was so well-crafted and beautiful, honoring the whole spectrum of what one might feel if they survived such a disaster, even the feelings we don't want to acknowledge. Definitely recommend for anyone who is looking for a book that promises hope, even when it feels like there's nothing left in the world.
November 7, 2025
Beautiful and poetically written. The natural disaster (tsunami) added much to the plot and I loved the comparison to the struggles of love. I was really rooting for Jane and Kenji, both apart and together. The theme of coming of age as well as dealing with grief made this book relatable to me. The overall plot was brilliant and made for a unique story from start to finish. What a beautiful read. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
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December 29, 2025Everything to the Sea by Alicia Upano is a coming of age novel that spans more than a decade. Set in Hawai’i, the novel follows Jane in her last summer home from college before she graduates and sets her sights on the ‘main continent’ for her post-college life. Enter Kenji. Jane had initially planned to entertain Kenji only as a summer fling, but their relationship grew more intense as the summer days ticked away, and she convinces him to come with her when she returns to her college campus. That decision will be one that changes the course of both of their lives when a few days later they watch a tsunami sweep away their hometown. The remaining majority of the novel follows how their paths diverge and reconverge again and again in the aftermath and aftershocks of the natural disaster.
I read through this novel pretty quickly. I found Jane and Kenji’s story compelling for the most part, and was really interested to read about the island in recovery, and Kenji’s dedication to being part of the rebuilding of Hilo. The way that Kenji dealt with his survivor grief read like a realistic depiction of how this might play out. I also appreciated the nuance that Upano wrote about the aftermath of the disaster. The bureaucracy and politics following a natural disaster is in some ways worse than the natural disaster itself, and Upano did not shy away from this here. She also wrote beautifully about the way a community comes together in the after. I thought this section was some of the most interesting and strongest written of the novel.
That being said, I really did not like Jane’s character and for this reason found it very difficult to care about what happened to her. While I can forgive Jane some of her more childish behaviors in her early 20s, I found many of her unforgiveable, and further, unrealistic? If a tsunami came and washed my family into the sea, I would be on the first plane/boat/train back home to look for them. Thus, Jane’s decision to stay back at school, especially after Kenji asked her to come back with him, was confusing to me. This was the first of many selfish and self-destructive behaviors that made it difficult, at least for me, to care about Jane’s character, and her outcome(s). In nearly all her relationships she was a taker, it was as if she expected the entire world to always revolve around her. Though her character arcs a bit by the end of the novel, it was too late, I had already divested. I love a flawed/grey character but I did not find her to have many? redeeming qualities.
Despite this, I still thought Everything to the Sea was an interesting read and would recommend it!
Thank you to William Morrow and Company Publishing, Alicia Upano, and NetGalley for an e-copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.
I read through this novel pretty quickly. I found Jane and Kenji’s story compelling for the most part, and was really interested to read about the island in recovery, and Kenji’s dedication to being part of the rebuilding of Hilo. The way that Kenji dealt with his survivor grief read like a realistic depiction of how this might play out. I also appreciated the nuance that Upano wrote about the aftermath of the disaster. The bureaucracy and politics following a natural disaster is in some ways worse than the natural disaster itself, and Upano did not shy away from this here. She also wrote beautifully about the way a community comes together in the after. I thought this section was some of the most interesting and strongest written of the novel.
That being said, I really did not like Jane’s character and for this reason found it very difficult to care about what happened to her. While I can forgive Jane some of her more childish behaviors in her early 20s, I found many of her unforgiveable, and further, unrealistic? If a tsunami came and washed my family into the sea, I would be on the first plane/boat/train back home to look for them. Thus, Jane’s decision to stay back at school, especially after Kenji asked her to come back with him, was confusing to me. This was the first of many selfish and self-destructive behaviors that made it difficult, at least for me, to care about Jane’s character, and her outcome(s). In nearly all her relationships she was a taker, it was as if she expected the entire world to always revolve around her. Though her character arcs a bit by the end of the novel, it was too late, I had already divested. I love a flawed/grey character but I did not find her to have many? redeeming qualities.
Despite this, I still thought Everything to the Sea was an interesting read and would recommend it!
Thank you to William Morrow and Company Publishing, Alicia Upano, and NetGalley for an e-copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 11, 2026
“Everything to the Sea” by Alicia Upano is a well-written coming of age novel and a beautiful debut. It is a story of Hawaii and what it means to be part of its culture and its people. Jane thinks she must escape from Hilo. She wants to be bigger than a small-town Island girl. She dreams of moving to the mainland and becoming an architect. Yet, when she falls in love, it is with a Hilo boy. For Jane, Kenji represents home.
Upano does a beautiful job of introducing the reader to the culture and value of a close-knit loving community. I enjoyed the love story between Jane and Kenji, but what I will take with me is the love story between Upano and Hawaii. I fell in love with the community, the inescapable connectivity, and the desire to do right by each other, even when the path isn’t clear or easy. While much of the plot is generated by a tsunami, the novel celebrates life and the beauty of connection and giving. In the novel, Kenji creates an art exhibit focused on the subjective experience of the tsunami. He wants people to be able to experience how it felt. In a sense, this is what Alicia Upano has done in “Everything to the Sea”. We experience the natural disaster through the characters and feel it’s aftershocks in the ways they deal with the trauma. We travel with them through grief and horror, and eventually to healing and self-discovery. In the end, this is a novel about what it means to choose to live and love in this world where everything can all be swept away in an instant.
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for access to this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Upano does a beautiful job of introducing the reader to the culture and value of a close-knit loving community. I enjoyed the love story between Jane and Kenji, but what I will take with me is the love story between Upano and Hawaii. I fell in love with the community, the inescapable connectivity, and the desire to do right by each other, even when the path isn’t clear or easy. While much of the plot is generated by a tsunami, the novel celebrates life and the beauty of connection and giving. In the novel, Kenji creates an art exhibit focused on the subjective experience of the tsunami. He wants people to be able to experience how it felt. In a sense, this is what Alicia Upano has done in “Everything to the Sea”. We experience the natural disaster through the characters and feel it’s aftershocks in the ways they deal with the trauma. We travel with them through grief and horror, and eventually to healing and self-discovery. In the end, this is a novel about what it means to choose to live and love in this world where everything can all be swept away in an instant.
Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for access to this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
December 7, 2025
This debut was a masterpiece.
Each page, a constant reminder: Life will always be unpredictable. No amount of prepping will save you from the pain of heartbreak and loss. Time is wasted worrying about the “right” and “wrong” choices. Love is complex; humans, even more so. Living is making mistakes, accepting the inevitable.
Throughout the novel, Jane and Kenji struggle to find meaning in their lives after a catastrophic tsunami destroys everything and everyone they love.
Their first “official” meeting as newly fresh adults was a heartwarming event. Their paths unknowingly crossed back when they were teenagers in high school, each in their own little worlds, unaware of a shared connection, until that very moment. Jane’s recollection of Kenji was amusing to read, and Kenji’s memories of her made me scream.
A perfect setup, right? What could go wrong? How could you not stick around for the drama?
Experiencing Hawaii’s landscape through their respective gazes was hauntingly beautiful. This book painted a stunning picture of its beauty and of the people who lived there.
That tsunami was a beast. The fear associated with this phenomenon isn’t unfounded; it wipes out everything in a split second—It's terrifying! Cannot imagine how these characters felt in that moment.
All in all, I loved this book! The structure felt like a K-drama (which I also love), filled with angst, drama, tragedy, romance, and HOPE—actually, this was way better. You are intimately and uncomfortably inside their heads, understanding their motives and dreams, seeing ALL their faults and ugliness. Greatly impacted my reading experience; it made the voices of these characters REAL and powerful, it made me WANT to listen, to follow them through the trauma and suffering, where eventually, they end up in a place full of peace and safety.
Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for this ARC. This is my honest review.
Each page, a constant reminder: Life will always be unpredictable. No amount of prepping will save you from the pain of heartbreak and loss. Time is wasted worrying about the “right” and “wrong” choices. Love is complex; humans, even more so. Living is making mistakes, accepting the inevitable.
Throughout the novel, Jane and Kenji struggle to find meaning in their lives after a catastrophic tsunami destroys everything and everyone they love.
Their first “official” meeting as newly fresh adults was a heartwarming event. Their paths unknowingly crossed back when they were teenagers in high school, each in their own little worlds, unaware of a shared connection, until that very moment. Jane’s recollection of Kenji was amusing to read, and Kenji’s memories of her made me scream.
A perfect setup, right? What could go wrong? How could you not stick around for the drama?
Experiencing Hawaii’s landscape through their respective gazes was hauntingly beautiful. This book painted a stunning picture of its beauty and of the people who lived there.
That tsunami was a beast. The fear associated with this phenomenon isn’t unfounded; it wipes out everything in a split second—It's terrifying! Cannot imagine how these characters felt in that moment.
All in all, I loved this book! The structure felt like a K-drama (which I also love), filled with angst, drama, tragedy, romance, and HOPE—actually, this was way better. You are intimately and uncomfortably inside their heads, understanding their motives and dreams, seeing ALL their faults and ugliness. Greatly impacted my reading experience; it made the voices of these characters REAL and powerful, it made me WANT to listen, to follow them through the trauma and suffering, where eventually, they end up in a place full of peace and safety.
Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for this ARC. This is my honest review.
December 2, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read and review this book! I enjoyed reading this book. Although, I’ll note that it may not be the typical hallmark movie romance that someone might want to read when they think of a romance.
This is a sad story in some ways, simply because two lovers find themselves enthralled with each other but both making mistakes and it is very much a right person, wrong time for both of them. So just when their love is boiling over and you think this is the happy ending, something ruins it and they have to start over again. Years go by in this story and the young love that you started with is not the love that lasts.
The ending makes me wonder if these two will have a second chance in another novel. But for now, they part ways to maybe see each other again in the future.
What I love about it, is that it seems so real. This felt like a story that could have happened to anyone. It feels like this could have been based on someone’s real life love story. High school sweet hearts who found each other later in life type of story. Romance novels are great but they are always so hot and heavy and you’re flying by the seat of your pants wondering how people can fall in love with just weeks of time between them. So I really appreciate seeing the other side of the possibilities within the romance world.
This is a sad story in some ways, simply because two lovers find themselves enthralled with each other but both making mistakes and it is very much a right person, wrong time for both of them. So just when their love is boiling over and you think this is the happy ending, something ruins it and they have to start over again. Years go by in this story and the young love that you started with is not the love that lasts.
The ending makes me wonder if these two will have a second chance in another novel. But for now, they part ways to maybe see each other again in the future.
What I love about it, is that it seems so real. This felt like a story that could have happened to anyone. It feels like this could have been based on someone’s real life love story. High school sweet hearts who found each other later in life type of story. Romance novels are great but they are always so hot and heavy and you’re flying by the seat of your pants wondering how people can fall in love with just weeks of time between them. So I really appreciate seeing the other side of the possibilities within the romance world.
November 14, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. I enjoyed this story about Jane and Kenji and their challenging relationship that spanned close to ten years. This story focuses on their relationship and their reaction to a tsunami that hit Hilo, Hawaii while they were in Honolulu and the ensuing death and destruction and their subsequent life style in the aftermath. Kenji returns to Hilo and rebuilds his life there, while Jane refuses to return and stays in Honolulu, this lifestyle of subsequent reunions and breakups is the basis of this story with different locations and timelines. Jane and Kenji each have their own desires, ambitions , needs and trust issues. The ending is somewhat uplifting with both characters realizing their own strengths and weaknesses and coming around full circle. I appreciate the tie in to the tsunami and I enjoyed learning about some Hawaiian history and culture.
December 9, 2025
A devastating tsunami causes the separation of Jane and Kenji for them each to deal with their grief. This was a heartwrenching then heartwarming book. It was beautifully written and atmospheric. Jane kind of drove me crazy at times, but mostly I liked her. I absolutely loved Kenji. I also had a hard time getting into the writing style, but once I did I really enjoyed this book and I would recommend this to people who are fans of literary fiction with a subplot of romance.
Thank you, NetGalley and William Morrow for allowing me to read this early. The opinion in this review is my own.
Thank you, NetGalley and William Morrow for allowing me to read this early. The opinion in this review is my own.
January 14, 2026
Thanks to NetGalley for my advance copy, I loved this book. It’s a story of love, loss and redemption. Finding yourself and your home after unimaginable tragedy. Despite the title, this story teaches us that not everything is lost to the sea after a tsunami. It follows Jane as she comes to terms with loss and destruction, finally finding herself and a purpose (and love). Beautifully written, I loved it.
October 27, 2025
4.5 ⭐️ Phenomenal but oh so painful. I cannot wait to reread this on audio
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