Akemi Dawn Bowman Book Club Part 1!

A Cas photo 2

Last week at work we were very lucky to be visited by YA author Akemi Dawn Bowman, who cam along to our teen bookclub to discuss her books, answer everyone’s questions and sign everyone’s books! Just a warning that there will be some spoilers for Starfish and Summer Bird Blue in this post!

I have split this post into two parts. The first part that you are reading deals with the discussion we had with Akemi about her books and the characters. In part 2, the discussion is more centred on writing and editing, and Akemi gives us an insight into her methods!

Firstly I have to say that she is one of the nicest people I have ever met! So down to earth and friendly, and happy to answer all of our questions with grace and kindness, it was a pleasure to have her visit.

My work bestie had made cake decorated specially for the evening, a delicious vegan chocolate cake with vegan icing decorated to match Akemi’s books! It was delicious, and was a brilliant way to begin the evening!

Akemi Cake

The discussion had with Akemi was fascinating, questions were asked about lots of different elements of her writing, from characters to anxiety, and even on her writing process, and her best tips for getting published!

One of the club’s favourite characters was Mr Watanabe, the grumpy old man who becomes one of Rumi’s closest friends in Summer Bird Blue. Turns out he is a grumpy version of her Grandad in Hawaii, I love learning about the inspiration behind author’s characters, and this was a lovely story to be told about one of my favourite characters. In fact Akemi’s father and grandparents are from there, a fact which I didn’t know but has made me love Summer Bird Blue even more.

We also had a fascinating discussion about anxiety and its depictions in teen fiction. Akemi’s books are some of the best portrayals of anxiety I have read, and they are my go to recommendations in the shop when I’m asked for books like that. It was interesting to hear that Akemi wrote the books because there was no depictions of anxiety when she was a teen herself, and that she wrote them so teens feeling anxious, or who have anxiety would know that it’s normal and to normalise it through YA fiction. This is particularly important to me, as when I was a teen there were very few books that dealt with anxiety, or even featured characters with anxiety, and so it was not something I experienced at a stage of my life when it would’ve been so useful.

Akemi was also asked about Jamie and Kiko’s relationship in Starfish and why she decided to make the relationship romantic. Akemi stated that this was because Kiko is so insecure about her biracial nationality and the way she looks, and she feels ugly and undateable because of this and Akemi wanted Kiko to learn through Jamie that Kiko is attractive and not ugly like she believes.

Akemi also told us how she believes that the two books (Starfish and Summer Bird Blue) compliment each other in the relationships within the novels. Both novels have difficult relationships between the main characters and their mothers, but both novels take different routes in regards to these relationships. The mothers’ actions and how they treat their children affect the children in different ways. Kiko’s mum can’t recognise that what she’s doing is abusive/neglectful, whereas Rumi’s mum sees the harm and tries to fix it by leaving Rumi, which in fact makes it worse. Akemi was determined that the novels should be stories of the survivors not the abusers, which was very important to us all as readers too.

Akemi table 2