Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman REVIEW

Summer Bird Blue

by Akemi Dawn Bowman

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Blurb

Rumi Seto spends a lot of time worrying she doesn’t have the answers to everything. What to eat, where to go, whom to love. 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.

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. 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. 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.

Aching, powerful, and unflinchingly honest, Summer Bird Blue explores big truths about insurmountable grief, unconditional love, and how to forgive even when it feels impossible.

Review

Summer Bird Blue is the tragic story of how one girl's life gets ripped apart and thrown upside down. When Rumi, her sister Lea and their mom are in an accident Lea dies and instead of grieving together their mom sends Rumi away to go live with an aunt she hardly knows. Angry, sad and confused Rumi must find her own way to heal, to forgive and to move on without letting go.

My heart completely crushed for Rumi. The way she was abandoned by her mother so she could deal with her own grief really frustrated me. While there is no right or wrong way to deal with grief, the mothers choices really caused my heart to ache. It was beautiful watching Rumi grow and become a stronger and better person through everything.

One of my favorite things about this book is Rumi's exploration of her sexuality. I absolutely love the way she didn't become that girl who "realized love was what was missing all along" but instead she just became a stronger person. She's figuring it out and not sure what she wants. AND THAT IS FINE!! I hate when books take teenage characters, make them fall in love with another teenage character and bam all problems solved! This one is so opposite of that I could seriously recommend it on that alone. However, there is a lot of other stuff to love so read it anyways.