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 their 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’ – teenage surfer Kai, who smiles too much and doesn’t take anything seriously, and 80-year-old George Watanabe, who succumbed to his own grief years ago – Rumi seeks 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 unconditional love, insurmountable grief, and how to forgive when it feels impossible.