I’ve been keeping this a secret for a little while (I’ve already gone through a round of edits with it!), but I can officially announce that Summer Bird Blue is going to be my second published book! I’m ecstatic. I love this story so much, and I can’t wait for you all to meet Rumi.
I don’t have a fancy Goodreads page or anything like that yet, but here’s a short synopsis:
SUMMER BIRD BLUE
Seventeen-year-old Rumi Seto spends a lot of time worrying she doesn’t have the answers to everything. Whether it’s as minor as her favorite food, or as important as her sexuality, she often feels lost in a world that’s just too big for her. 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.
But then Lea dies in a tragic accident, and her mother sends her to live with her aunt in Hawaii while she deals with her own grief. 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 eighty-year-old named George Watanabe, who succumbed to his own grief years ago—Rumi tries to find her way back to her music, to write the song she and Lea never had the chance to finish.
Summer Bird Blue is a story about family, loss, and learning how to say goodbye to someone who is already gone. Set for publication in Fall 2018 with Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster.