Newly wed Kittie, a dressmaker recruited by missionaries, sails to Hawai’i in 1829 where her life begins to hopelessly unravel. The islands are nothing what she’d expected, her husband’s heart proves blacker than his bible, her best friend Emmie is sent to another island, then she meets the vaquero Diego who makes the air suddenly taste like sugar and sunshine.

She had come to the islands so triumphantly, now on the eve of her sudden sailing back to New Bedford she opens the rusty lock of her old sea chest to exhume her past. Like shadows of memories in the yellow light of the whale-oil lantern, she casts the dresses from her trunk across the bed, the chair, her sewing table. Out comes a ripped black silk gown, a thread hangs loose, the seam comes undone, and a memory falls out taking her back to all she tried to shut away.

The morning stars will soon be fading above the Fair Wind—it will be Kittie’s wedding ship as soon as they are under full sail. Each dress and article holds a story; as she finishes she notices a leather billfold lying almost invisible on the bottom of the trunk like an island chameleon. She slowly holds it close to the smoky lantern and brings herself to open it. And then her perfectly mended future rips apart.

Kittie came to Hawai’i with those set out to change it, yet it is she who changes, caught up in a sweeping riptide of colonialism and the powerful force of spirit that emanates from the islands themselves.