Susanna Moore's novel is set in a Hawaii whose shimmering beauty and melancholy traditions are at once seductive and dangerously hard to leave. Or so they prove for Clio, a thirteen-year-old runaway who is raised by her eccentric aunt Emma, a collector of legends, myths, and rites of their native island. Emma teaches Clio what it means to "swim out of the currents of time" to exchange her small past for a grand one. Hut when that same past begins to take on a crushing weight, Clio on impulse marries a well-known Hollywood actor, providing her with the promise of escape from her family and the entanglements of island life.