“Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle”

D. Carreira Ching

Bamboo Ridge Press, $18

Focusing on the future without first reconciling the past can prove difficult, especially in Hawaii, where history surrounds us in stories passed between generations.

“I get one family, I get one purpose, I not alone,” thinks Kaeo, the eldest of three brothers from Oahu’s Windward shore in D. Carreira Ching’s unsparing first novel, “Between Sky and Sea: A Family’s Struggle.”

However, despite his love for his family and their efforts to keep him close, Kaeo isolates and risks himself.

Kaeo’s fate drives the plot of the novel, in which Ching chronicles each brother’s story in turn as each realizes he must face his own demons and discover his own identity.

Kaeo, a promising student at first, yearns to define himself as a Hawaiian while battling the substance abuse — awa, alcohol, crystal meth — that plagues him and his family.

Mark, the middle brother, feels stuck beneath Kaeo’s shadow and seeks to escape his resentments and establish himself as an individual. When Kaeo runs away from home, Mark is “ecstatic” — until their mother says he can’t claim Kaeo’s room. With his grandfather dying of cancer and his parents working full time, Mark, despite his own job, takes on much of the household responsibility. His girlfriend, Lana, observes, “He looked like he was in costume, wearing an older skin.”

Elani, the youngest, immerses himself in the fictional world of books to distract himself from the turmoil of his family. He goes away to college but is called back by tragedy and finds himself reading Kaeo’s journals.

Ching depicts how the sum of a person’s actions weighs heavy in Hawaii, where the warmth and intimacy of being local clashes with the inescapable realities of island life.

Local or not, Ching’s perceptive tale should help readers discover connections with others and truths within themselves that have slumbered just beneath the waves.