Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman (review)

Rumi has felt like more of a mother to her little sister, Lea, than their mother, and as the sisters have gotten older, they have developed a shared passion for making music and writing songs that Rumi is convinced will be their career. When Lea is killed in a car crash, however, Rumi is devastated, especially when her mother sends her to live with her aunt in Hawaii. She takes her anger out on everyone she meets, including Kai, the cute boy next door who tries to befriend her, Mr. Watanabe, a grumpy elderly neighbor who is the only person she can tolerate because he gives as good as he gets, and her longsuffering aunt. While everyone, including Kai, thinks she should be attracted to Kai, Rumi just wants him as a friend, deciding ultimately that she may be asexual or aromantic. Rumi's view of Lea as flawless and her mourning through anger are authentic and poignant. However, Rumi's ruminations focuses on her self-loathing, her anger at her mother, and her adulatory memories of her sister become laboriously attenuated, especially since the turn of the plot, wherein she rediscovers music, is inevitable. Secondary characters are conveniently positioned to help her work through her grief, forgiving her everyday meanness and angry outbursts and possessing just the qualities she needs to question her sexuality and understand the consequences of persisting in angry, incommunicative isolation. Dialogue between Rumi and Kai, who along with other characters often speaks in Hawaiian Pidgin, helps to break up the unvarying focus on Rumi's inner monologue, however, and readers who live for wrenching feels may find enough to invest in here.