Reviews

Midori by Moonlight
by Wendy Nelson Tokunaga
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Midori by Moonlight is more than mere chick-lit. It’s a cross-cultural romp through the streets of San Francisco with a bit of romance for dessert, and it’s wonderfully funny with characters who read as very real.

When we first meet our heroine Midori Saito, she is in the too-pink guest bedroom of her fiancé’s parents’ home, and he is telling her the wedding is off. She’s upset about this, as much because she loved her American boyfriend Kevin as because her mother sent her off to America just a week before warning her that this would happen. Of course, Midori hadn’t expected it to happen the morning after their engagement party.

No woman wants to enable her mother to say “I told you so.”

Within minutes she’s packed off to the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel, with her suitcases, new plane tickets, and a business card with the home number of Kevin’s token Asian friend, the only other person at the party who spoke Japanese, Shinji, who goes by Sean “because it’s easier for Americans to remember.” Adventures follow, of course, but in the end there’s always Shinji-Sean.

I’m always a little worried about novels that rely on fish-out-of-water foreigner-in-new-country stereotyping - the PC part of me worries whether it’s okay to laugh at language issues, for example - but Midori is incredibly well-drawn, and doesn’t feel like a caricature at all, and her story is helped by the fact that author Tokunaga is a San Francisco native and expert on Japanese culture.

Published in September, 2007, by St. Martin’s Griffin.

Melissa A. Bartell left her heart in San Francisco, because her books took up too much room in her luggage. She is a freelance writer living and working in the Dallas, TX metroplex, and generally reads 2-3 books a week. She is the Senior Editor here at All Things Girl. Find out more about her on our About Page. You can find her at her blog as well as other places here and there.

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