Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Tokunaga,
You had me fooled. I thought you were Japanese. From the minute I started reading this, I felt like a Japanese woman was writing it, and it had been published in Japan. And since this is written from your heroine’s close point of view and she’s a Japanese woman, that’s a good thing, though not all readers might see it that way.

I am endlessly fascinated by Japan, both the good and the bad of it. The reserved Japanese styles of interpersonal and intrapersonal interactions are particularly fascinating to me, and though I’m not Japanese I felt you really nailed that aspect of the main character, at least from what I know. You portrayed the shortcomings of Midori’s style of thinking and acting when it came to her dealing with a new culture, and fairly portrayed the good and bad as she saw it of American behavior. There’s not a lot of overt emotion here, just always measured responses, which are accurate but also unfortunately not all that exciting to read about.

That kind of sums up the pros and …

Dear Ms. Tokunaga,

I was really looking forward to Midori by Moonlight. It sounded so interesting: a Japanese woman coming to San Francisco to marry an American man, only to get dumped for his ex-fiancée and then left to fend for herself. I don’t think I’ve read many womens fiction/chick lit novels with that premise, and I’m always looking for something new and different. But I’m sorry to say, while the idea may have been fresh, the execution was not.

In Japan, thirty-year-old Midori Saito is the nail that can’t get hammered down. She loves all things American, balks at her parents’ matchmaking attempts, and dreams of moving to the United States to work as a tour guide. When an American proposes to her after a whirlwind romance, it’s her dream come true. Unfortunately, the dream doesn’t last long — her fiance dumps her the day after their engagement party.

Midori has no desire to return to Japan. She’s finally in the U.S., where she’s always wanted to go, and she has no intention of proving her mother’s dire predictions correct. Lucky for her, her ex-fiance has an old college friend, Shinji, who offers …

Dear Ms. Tokunaga,

By now most of our regular readers know that I like books which promise to be something different, something unique and your book certainly delivers on both. But while I enjoyed the book, cheered on Midori and was happy that she at last finds her true love, I couldn’t help feeling that I never really saw beneath the surface of most of the characters. Whether they were good or bad characters, most of them were little more than two dimensional cutouts methodically working their way through this fairy tale of a novel.

You start the book by dropping us straight into the action. Midori Saito has arrived in San Francisco to marry her American fiance. It’s the culmination of a dream for her since she’s always wanted to 1) marry a non-Japanese man and 2) live in the US. I guess her desires must have blinded her to what an asshat Kevin is. He’s one of the characters who has no side except asshatiness. Later in the book Midori wonders what on earth she ever saw in him but this was my thought from the minute he steps …