Akashic Books, 205 pages, trade paperback, $14.95

K.E. Silva’s first novel, A Simple Distance, tells the story of Jean Souza and the two worlds she inhabits: San Francisco and the fictional West Indian island of Baobique. As an attorney in the US, Jean is every bit the intellectual and introspective woman who prides herself on her self-reliance. When her uncle dies in her mother’s native country, Jean is forced to do what we all must do when confronted with our family — she begins to see herself through the eyes of those who claim her for their own.

Jean’s story is one of displacement, rootlessness, and uncertainty. For her, these emotions are felt while she is at “home” with her mother. Baobique is a place where strangers seem more familiar than blood-related family members. Upon her return to the island, Jean comes face-to-face with an old lover, their unsettled history, and their intimacy’s impact on her family’s local power and prestige. Plagued by flashbacks of a rocky relationship with her mother and a less-than-idyllic upbringing, Jean refuses to take the easy road by blaming her past, present, and future relationships on her childhood experiences. Rather, she deconstructs herself, piece-by-piece, to examine her influences and to measure them against her choices.

Silva’s ability to tell Jean’s story with the equal amounts of harshness and delicacy it deserves is the best reason to pick up this book. The descriptions of Baobique’s lush landscape and overgrowth nicely mirror Jean’s realization of her inability to be fully separated from her past. In my ignorance, I read the entire novel without knowing that the island had been created from Silva’s clever and vivid imagination. Her writing style is mostly ordinary (which makes for an easy read), but no one should read this under the assumption that her words are commonplace. Silva’s prose is often prickled with poetic phrases. One sort of interesting choice she made was to use italics when indicating dialogue, as opposed to quotation marks. This style lends itself nicely to a quiet experiment that deals with toeing the line between thought and speech. The result allows the reader to fully immerse him or herself into the complete dreamlike state of the characters’ emotions and actions.

Writing style aside, Silva does an incredible amount of multitasking here. Between the plot of a tardy coming-of-age protagonist and her tumultuous relationships with her family, K.E. Silva manages to make commentary about the aftermath of colonialism and its effects on the postcolonized, as well as interrogating certain antiquated social mores and the repercussions of forbidden love (the aforementioned “lover” does not mean “boyfriend” here). Given that Silva practices civil rights law, her knowledge of third-world economics and government is not surprising, but certainly is unexpected in this work of fiction. She pulls it off well, however, and the reader will finish the book with a better understanding of the postcolonial experience.

Deep in the heart of Silva’s novel, Jean points out that “sometimes there is a simple distance through which we must pass before we can even begin.” I think a pretty good place to start would be giving this book a read.