Just Finished Reading Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman

Summer Bird Blue is a 2018 young adult novel by Akemi Dawn Bowman.  Rumi Seto loves her little sister Lea, as they grow up in Washington, D.C. with their mother after their selfish father left them following Lea's birth.  The two teenage girls are avid musicians, Rumi on the piano and Lea with the guitar...and are heavily into writing their own songs, both music and lyrics...they have a technique by which they call out three words randomly and use that as a basis for a new song: the latest one is "summer", "bird", "blue". But one day while they're all together in the car there is an accident and Lea dies from it.  Left without her very best friend, Rumi sinks further into despair and anger when she discovers that she is being shipped out to live with her aunt in Hawaii...how could her mother abandon her like this? Most of the book is about how Rumi deals with her grief and anger...she gets to know her neighbors on either side of her temporary new home: teenager/surfer boy Kai and the elderly, gruff Mr. Watanabe.  In all her interactions with others Rumi is blunt and critical, both of them and herself...and she cannot experience anything without being reminded of her dead sister.  During the course of this grief period she has memory flashbacks of the two of them, including their conflicts and Rumi's jealousy of Lea's popularity and her mother's perceived favoritism toward her sister.  Rumi has promised her departed sister that she will finish writing that final song Summer Bird Blue, but in her current state she finds herself blocked.  Along with the main story line is Rumi's examination of her own attitudes toward sexuality as well as the ethnically diverse composition of the characters...the latter is interesting and welcome but the relationships and personalities here are universals that could easily transfer to other settings.  If you can put up with the adolescent self-absorption and explosive rage that Rumi displays throughout the book, I think you, like myself, will find it a difficult, but enlightening look at what the loss of a very close person in one's life can bring out.  I was touched by the grace shown by those around Rumi as she went through her pain...