Lea leans forward and plants a kiss on Mom’s freckled cheek, their faces blending together like a blur of bronze skin and curls the color of burnt coffee. I’ll just sit here quietly, the unpaid taxi driver whose daughters won’t talk to her.” Shama thrush are beautiful songbirds, you know.” “I think ‘black’ would’ve given you more options. Her eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. Lea and I speak at the exact same time, our voices colliding against each other’s like cymbals. “What does a bird have to do with summer or blue?” Mom asks.

Most people think Lea and I are two of the weirdest people in the universe when we’re writing songs. She’s heard us play this game a thousand times, but she still doesn’t fully understand it. Mom looks over her shoulder, the arch in her brow a mix of curiosity and amusement. Lea’s face lights up like every star in the sky just turned on at once. With the help of the “boys next door”-a teenage surfer named Kai, who smiles too much and doesn’t take anything seriously, and an eighty-year-old named George Watanabe, who succumbed to his own grief years ago-Rumi attempts to find her way back to her music, to write the song she and Lea never had the chance to finish.Īching, powerful, and unflinchingly honest, Summer Bird Blue explores big truths about insurmountable grief, unconditional love, and how to forgive even when it feels impossible. Now thousands of miles from home, Rumi struggles to navigate the loss of her sister, being abandoned by her mother, and the absence of music in her life. Then Lea dies in a car accident, and her mother sends her away to live with her aunt in Hawaii while she deals with her own grief.

But there is one thing she is absolutely sure of-she wants to spend the rest of her life writing music with her younger sister, Lea. Rumi Seto spends a lot of time worrying she doesn’t have the answers to everything. Three starred reviews for this stunning novel about a mixed-race teen who struggles to find her way back to her love of music in the wake of her sister’s death, from the author of the William C. “Grabs your heart and won’t let go.” - Book Riot “Gorgeous prose and heartbreaking storytelling.” - Paste Magazine “A lyrical novel about grief, love, and finding oneself in the wake of a tragic loss.” - Bustle

Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman