This review has been sitting on a shelf while I sorted out my thoughts about Tokyo Dreaming. There will be some spoilers because I just don’t know how to review it without. For those of you who don’t want to be spoiled I will say this, if you are a fan of the first book Tokyo Ever After, then you will likely get pissed off by the start and general plot of this book. If you, like me, have never read the first book then the end of this book is likely going to make you flip a table like I did. The middle 70% was a really enjoyable read.
The Concept
If you are unfamiliar with this series, it started with the book Tokyo Ever After, where a teenage girl named Izzy discovers that the father she has never met before is a member of the Japanese royal family. What ensues is a sort of Princess Diaries scenario set in Japan. Basically, imagine if the movie The Prince and Me had kept the alternate ending where she goes back home deciding that a royal life is not what she wants. Only she discovers that she is pregnant and raises the baby alone. 18 years later her daughter discovers the truth of who her dad is and flies off to meet him. The first book tells the story of Izzy learning to navigate being a royal, living in Japan, and falling in love with her bodyguard.
The second book tells the story of Izzy’s parents rekindling their 20 year old romance. Unfortunately the Japanese media doesn’t really like either Izzy or her mother, and the royal council blocks her parents’ engagement. Tokyo Dreaming is a story about Izzy deciding to do whatever she needs to do for her parents’ happiness. She will become a perfect Japanese princess, even if it means enlisting the help of her horrible cousins whom she has nicknamed The Shining Twins. She will get into the college her father went to. She will fake date the perfect boy to please the media.
I wish for everybody’s sake that the book had simply focused on Izzy’s relationship with her cousins and parents. Unfortunately, this is a YA Romance, so we need some romance… and that’s where it all falls apart.
Semi Spoilers
I’m labelling this as semi-spoilers because the main spoiler in here is hinted at in the book description and happens in the first few chapters.
The book starts out by ending the romance from the first book. Izzy’s perfect bodyguard boyfriend pulls a Noble Idiocy and decides to break up with her when he goes off to become a pilot. The Japanese media hates him. They don’t think that he is good enough to be dating a princess. He breaks up with Izzy in order to give her mom and dad their best shot at winning over the royal council. The book relies on you knowing him from the first book (which is fair) in order to love him. As a first time reader, he seemed fine, but not particularly well-fleshed out. I didn’t really care when he left other than for the fact that it broke Izzy’s heart.
It seemed like a really weird way to start the book. I know that temporary break-ups and love triangles are a staple of YA Romance novels, but I figured this one for a forced separation not a total break. When it became increasingly clear that the bodyguard was not coming back I felt badly for the fans of the first book. It’s like when a second season of a drama (looking at you BL dramas 😒) decides that it has to add cheating in to spice things up. Cheating negates the romance you sold in the first season. Similarly, this felt like it was a smack in the face for the fans of the original. I’ll be honest though, with no horse in this race, it made absolute sense to me. As a middle-aged woman, it read as very realistic to me that the teenage first love was not the forever love. That’s simply the reality that most people have. Some people marry people they met as teenagers, most do not. I was actually kind of impressed at the author’s willingness to tell a real story about a very unreal situation.
I leaned back and relaxed and enjoyed the story that was being told. I truly loved the story of Izzy trying to navigate both the Japanese media and their education system. The relationship she developed with her cousins, who appear to have been a bit of the villain in the first book, was delightful. The romance for this book is a friends to lovers set up with a boy who is brought in to help Izzy get into a prestigious college. He is a wonderful character and it is easy to see why Izzy would fall for him. The struggle her mother goes through in order to become “worthy” of her future husband’s family was interesting and well done. I was well on my way to giving this book a solid 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads… and then we hit the 80% mark.
We Got Cheese in the Trapped! BIG SPOILERS!
So, imagine if you will, a sweet Kdrama romcom. All the posters and teasers and trailers have made it clear that you are about to enjoy a Park Min Young/Ji Chang Wook 2.0 story. You are primed. You are ready. The drama starts and they are cute AF together, just as you knew they would be. Then when you hit the end of episode 2, Ji Change Wook’s character does a Noble Idiocy and takes off never to be seen again. By the end of episode 4 it is clear that he is not coming back. They’ve introduced a very lovely Seo Kang Joon second lead and you’re thinking “okay, bit weird, but I know that this works too so let’s go”.
What unfolds is a lovely drama. Sweet, slow burn romance. Enemies to best friends plot with the cousins who seemed totally Evil Stepsister in the first couple of episodes. A very realistic and relatable story about how the media can overwhelm and destroy famous people. This drama is well on it’s way to becoming one of your absolute favourite romcoms for the year.
Then episode 14 happens.
At the end of episode 14 everything is going pretty great. Mom seems to be having a bit of a struggle, but you’re sure that will get sorted out over the next 2 episodes. Everything else is smooth sailing from here on out. And then at a wonderfully romantic evening, Mr. First Lead shows back up. We haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for 12 episodes. No phone calls, no montages, no nothing. He’s just been completely gone. The only time we’ve had him at all mentioned was to make it clear that our Female Lead is healing and getting over him. But now in the last 5 minutes of episode 14, he’s back. He’s declaring his true love. He was a fool, he says. He was scared of the media. He wants another chance now that he’s seen that she’s happy with someone else.
But you’re not worried. You’ve watched a lot of dramas. You know how this goes. This is our female lead’s time to shine. She might struggle for a bit, but ultimately she will realize that he is the past and Sweet Second Lead is her future.
You should have worried.
If you are a fan of the first book, well, congratulations! You got your happily ever after. If you are a fan of the second book, you just got slapped in the face. That’s right. The guy that we spent exactly zero time with was the end game. Out of nowhere he comes back and claims his woman.
I honestly thought from the way the writing was going that maybe this was actually going to be the second of 3 books and Tokyo Dreaming would end with Izzy choosing herself over both boys. Realizing that maybe all she needed was family and friends, and then go off to college and start fresh with neither boy. But that is not the ending we got. It was almost as if the author wrote a the whole book and then remembered that she was supposed to have brought it back around full circle. Maybe she was just tired of writing these characters and decided that there wasn’t a third book in her. That’s fair. But then this book should have either been written differently or ended differently.
Final Verdict
This book fails as a book. I’m sorry, but it does. Romance is meant to have a happy ending, that’s true, but it’s meant to have a happy ending for the story that is IN THE BOOK. Emiko Jean wrote a very lovely book, and then tacked on a happy ending from some other story. In Tokyo Dreaming, she sold a bill of goods that was not delivered. It was a weird choice. Maybe the point was to appease the lovers of the first book, but I imagine most of them would have rage quit well before getting to their happy ending. This book could have been great with a different ending. It would have worked fine as an open ended middle to a trilogy. It would have been okay if both books had been put together and published as one story. Unfortunately, none of those things happened.
If you’re interested in reading my thoughts on other YA Romances, check out my book reviews of Daughter of the Moon Goddess and Six Crimson Cranes