Now she feels guilty for being alive and she doesn’t know how she can live a life without the one person who really understood her. She was often times jealous of her sister. Rumi always felt that her mother loved Lea more. She would start to get better and things would get bad again. Music is magic and lightning and fireworks. Can I just be in love with music? Because music is a carnival at night, lit up by a thousand stars and bursting with luminescent colors and magical illusions. “But those are the feelings I get from music. Some of my favorite quotes included something about music. Music is such a big part of the story and I loved how the author wrote about it. Until she feels guilty for living her life when Lea is not able to. Rumi hangs out with Kai and his friends and starts feeling comfortable. This was another thing that she struggled with throughout the book.

Rumi finds him attractive, but she’s not attracted to anyone in the dating sense. But she’s still stuck with her song.Īnother neighbor is a teen, Kai. Slowly she starts listening to music with him and then playing it. He’s grumpy and she recognizes that he lost someone close to him, too. There is an elderly neighbor with an annoying dog that she starts to visit. She can’t write, but she promises that she will write a song for the last three words the girls came up with together. She is mostly angry at everyone and everything. There’s no color left in my soul, just like there’s no music left in there either.” “The only thing that’s dull and gray and dark in Hawaii is me. Her mom isn’t functioning well, so Rumi goes to Hawaii with her aunt. When a car accident claims Lea’s life, Rumi is devastated. They used to write songs by picking three words. But they loved each other and had a bound through music. Rumi wasn’t the type to show her emotions easily. Rumi was often times jealous of Lea because she was happy and easy to love. Rumi and Lea were not only sisters, but best friends. I really loved the writing and emotion in it. I haven’t read Starfish yet, so this is my first book by Akemi Dawn Bowman. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Rumi Seto spends a lot of time worrying she doesn’t have the answers to everything.

Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman