With visual imagery that matches the vivid subject matter of her island home, Nancy Anne Miller writes about a colonial childhood within the echoes of empire, the shadow of slavery and the complexity of island life which tourism has glossed over. She recounts the effect of the ocean on identity, and the vulnerability of an island almost seven hundred miles at sea. Now residing in the United States, she compares the two cultures through an immigrant's experience and writes back to her home with the pathos of loss and with the buoyancy of gratitude.