As I was still in the mood for some lighter reads recently, I plucked another young adult novel from my shelf. My most recent bargain purchase, My Almost Flawless Tokyo Dream Life by Rachel Cohn, was the most perfect choice I could have made!
Elle is celebrating her sixteeth birthday, though I don’t know if you could call that day a particularly special one. Living in a sketchy foster home that only let’s her shower once a week means that she’s been the target of many school bullies. It’s hard wrapping her head around her current reality when just two years ago she was having the best birthday with her mom and her cat. When injury and opiates take hold though, things change. Her mom’s neglect means she lost both her cat and her mother. Though prison has ended up being the intervention she needed. Elle doesn’t hate her mother, she just hates where it’s put her in her most important years.
But perhaps birthdays really are about surprises, because Elle comes home to the biggest surprise of her life! Waiting in her driveway is her “uncle” Masa in a fancy car with a passport and a declaration that he is taking her to live with her father in Japan. Her father who she’s never known anything about up to now. As crazy as I thought she was for saying no at first, I guess that would be incredibly hard for a sixteen year old to wrap their head around no matter how bad her current situation was. But, her desire to live a better life gets the better of her, so she’s treated to a first class flight on the way over to Tokyo.
Meeting her father, Kenji Takahara, is a quick and awkward affair. Like Elle, I was surprised that he wasn’t going to take any time away from work to get to know Elle a little bit more initially. But, he has inherited a luxury hotel chain from his father, which means Elle is now rich rich. Still, that means she maybe only gets a couple hours at most each night to try and crack all things about her father. He’s not the warmest, but you can tell he’s really trying. He new aunt and grandmother, however, are pretty cold and rigid towards her. It’s probably because she’s not full Japanese, and I can’t imagine that they have a great outlook on black people. But, she vows to just ignore them for the time being and make the most of her new surroundings.
This means going to a fancy international school where she manages to immediately befriend the most popular girl at school, Imogen, the daughter of a fashion mogul. While Imogen is nice for the most part, she’s not as personable as one would hope, and her friend group is even more off-putting. I would have loved to have read more pages about her and Akemi’s friendship, but I can see where that wouldn’t add much conflict to the story. I was also a little surprised at some of the more intense scenes that cropped up towards the end of the novel. Surprised, but impressed at how Cohn tackled real world problems that even teenagers face all the time.
The family drama comes to a head at the end of the novel, as it should, but I felt like it was resolved way too quickly and then all of a sudden the book was done. it almost felt like a throwaway. For all the details we got, and time spent on certain parts of this world, I felt like this book could have easily been another hundred pages. And what sucks is I don’t think there will ever be a follow up to this novel, which I would love! It does have me curious to check out more of her work, so stay tuned!