Summer Bird Blue Review

From Goodreads: 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.

Thanks to Netgalley for sending me an E-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Last year, Starfish was one of my favourite reads. I loved the way the story had so much depth, and I felt like it was really a book that I could both laugh and cry at. So obviously, I was so excited to be able to pick up Summer Bird Blue early.

I’ll be honest, I was so excited that I decided to go into the book blind (without reading the synopsis). As a result, I read the first little bit and started to have a horrible sinking feeling in my chest as I realised Lea was probably going to die. I know, I know, it is right there in the synopsis, so I won’t go ahead and pat myself on the back for guessing this, but man it was a terrible blow all the same.

It was great to see glimpses of Hawaii in the pages of Summer Bird Blue. I liked seeing how different it was for Rumi from her home in Washington, and as hard as it sometimes was for me to pick apart the Pidgin English, I thought the book really benefitted from including it. I liked how it forced me to read sections of the book out loud to myself, and how Rumi’s own struggles to comprehend it at times worked so well with her own grief and inability to express her feelings.

I didn’t find Summer Bird Blue quite as engaging as Starfish. I found Rumi a harder protagonist to connect with, although I totally understood where her prickliness and anger came from. She comes across as a very easy character to understand, but I think I am just such a different person that I sometimes struggled to see how a person could follow these lines of thought. Like, for example, she lashes out at her mother because she is jealous of her relationship with Lea, to the extent where she kind of gloats to her mom that Lea said her name as she died and so she was the most important person to her sister. I haven’t lost someone who was this close to me, so I guess maybe I’m not the best judge, but I did find it a bit confusing. It didn’t make me necessarily like Rumi less, but it did make it harder for me to not wince at her behaviour at times. My favourite character was definitely Mr. Wantanabe. I loved his gruff grumpiness, and how he managed to connect to Rumi without even saying very much. He got through to her in a way that I thought was genuine and brilliant and this is the friendship that absolutely kept me turning the pages. I didn’t feel so connected to Kai, but I did enjoy seeing how he grew throughout the story.

As with Starfish, I think the two best selling points of Summer Bird Blue is the complexity of the situation unspooling throughout, and the beautiful descriptions. I’m usually not someone who loves deep and difficult contemporary novels—I am a light and fluffy girl at heart. But I do think Bowman paints a great and multifaceted glimpse at grief and our own understanding of mortality and life. It’s something that I’ve seen a lot of in YA, but it is rarely something I have seen done so well. Which kind of naturally leads to me discussing the descriptions. Music is how Rumi understands her loss, and so many of the most poignant descriptions in the book occur when she is writing a song, or when she’s tinkering with a piano. I loved every single word of these descriptions, and honestly they just blew me away. If nothing else, everyone who wants to be a good writer should look at Bowman’s amazing descriptions because I feel like we could all learn a thing or two. Also, I definitely did not cry during the songs. I was chopping onions at that exact moment in time.

Overall, I’d give Summer Bird Blue an 8/10 stars. I loved the descriptions and the way Bowman delves into the difficult theme of grief, but I sometimes found it hard to connect to the protagonist. However, it is a really poignant book and I fell in love with so many aspects of it, so I’d definitely recommend picking up a copy when it comes out.

Has anyone else read this book already or plans to? What do you all think of it? Let me know in the comment section down below ❤