Book Review- Summer Bird Blue

Title: Summer Bird Blue

Author: Akemi Dawn Bowman
Published: 11th September 2018
Pages: 375
Genre: YA, Contemporary, LGBTQI+, 


Rating: 4.5/5 stars

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. -Goodreads

My thanks to Net Galley and Black & White Publishing for the ebook copy of this novel to review.
I don’t read that much YA contemporary fiction, so this was a wee step out of my comfort zone, but I’m so glad I took the step.
This novel is simply incredible. The diverse representation is so important, the main character Rumi is mixed race; white and Hawaiian/Japanese, and the novel is set in Hawaii with a group of characters who are natives to Hawaii. Rumi is also questioning/exploring her sexuality, and is exploring identifying (albeit loosely) as asexual. This is one of only a handful of YA novels I know of that feature asexuality, but don’t try to “cure” it or have the character have a relationship with another character, instead letting Rumi explore and question as much as she wants, and have the other characters fully accept her.
The novel’s main theme is bereavement, Rumi is dealing with the loss of her sister and best friend during this novel. A word of warning: this novel is pretty heavy, the way the author writes about grief is incredible, but if you weren’t in a great place mentally while reading it, it could be quite affecting, so please bare this in mind when deciding whether to pick the book up or not.
But the novel itself is brilliant. It is full of so much feeling and heart and grief and how Rumi comes to terms with her feelings, and how to keep your identity after heartbreak and allow yourself to consider personal growth. Bowman writes everything with so much depth and heart, it’s a novel that is well worth reading.
The rest of the characters are very well-developed and written too. Kai is such a likeable guy, he is a source of light and humour in the novel, which beautifully contrasts with Rumi and how she is feeling, and stops the novel from being too dark to read in its entirety. He does make Rumi seem even more unlikeable, but I enjoyed this element to her character. I didn’t like her, but I did sympathise with her, and although I disagreed with a lot of her decisions, I could understand why she acted the way she did.
Overall I really enjoyed this novel. Even though it was a heavy, emotional read which dealt with some serious and emotional issues, I highly recommend it! 


Buy Summer Bird Blue here (affiliate link) 


Have you read this novel? Do you read contemporary YA?