Exclusive Cover Reveal: Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman

We’re huge Akemi Dawn Bowman fans at Paste Magazine. We named her debut, Starfish, one of the best Young Adult books of 2017, and it has since been nominated for the prestigious William C. Morris Award. A story about family, race and identity, Starfish is a moving novel worth immediately reading—especially since her second book, Summer Bird Blue, is coming soon!

Bowman’s sophomore novel is another stunning book about family, this one interlaced with tragedy and grief. Here’s the scoop on the novel from the publisher, Simon Pulse:

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 Rumi 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.