Summer Bird Blue

By: Akemi Dawn Bowman

Narrated by: Em Eldridge

Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

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 80-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.

©2018 Akemi Dawn Bowman (P)2018 Tantor

Aroaces relate strongly, Wonderful grief depiction

This book was a little slow in the first third, but picked up the pace after that and was just so fantastic with many loveable and rich characters and such an honest take on what grief is like as well as what being aro & ace is like for a teenage girl.

As a 31 year old woman who's experienced traumatic and intense loss multiple times in my life and is on the aromantic spectrum and is also asexual, the book spoke deeply to my on multiple levels. I would say that there is one part of the book that disappointed me by not making it clear enough that it's not a personal choice or moral failing to become suicidal and that people shouldn't have to apologize for feeling that way. But everything else in the book is so well done. I cried at multiple moments throughout the latter two thirds.

There are many intense parts and I'd consider looking up trigger warnings in other reviews before reading. there are also many times the protagonist is thinking to herself where it might be unclear for a moment in audiobook form whether it's dialogue or thoughts, but it became clear in context to me every single time and wasn't a problem. The performance was wonderful. There are times a song is sung in the book and the audiobook only reads it like a poem, but it works and you know what you are a reader are supposed to be imagining.

Needs a different narrator

I'm going to be honest and say that I couldn't get past the first few chapters. This book is beautifully written and I would love to finish it; it's just going to have to be with a traditional book and not an audio book. The narrator lacks the nuance/inflection/cadence of the Hawaiian Pidgin English. As a local Hawaiian, this inauthentic reading really took away from me being able to enjoy what I think may be a really fantastic story.