Carrie Asai

Reasons that I knew this book was going to be awesomely bad from the very start:

1. According to the inside cover, it's copyrighted to a corporation ("17th Street Productions, an Alloy company"), not the "author."

2. The back copy reads: "When I was six months old, I dropped from the sky -- the lone survivor of a deadly Japanese plane crash. The newspapers named me Heaven. I was adopted by a wealthy family in Tokyo, pampered, and protected. For nineteen years, I thought I was lucky. I'm learning how wrong I was. THEY SAY YOUR LIFE BEGINS ON YOUR WEDDING DAY. Here's what happened on mine: I lost the person I love most. I learned that everything I knew about my family was a lie. Now I'm being hunted. I must fight back ... or die. My life ended that day. The old Heaven is gone. I AM SAMURAI GIRL."

3. There are free removable tattoos (which read: SAMURAI GIRL) in the back of the book.

Reasons that I knew this book was exceeding my wildest expectations while I was reading it:

1. Page 8: "And this is the Beverly Wilshire, I reminded myself. This is where a powerful businessman fell in love with a hooker. Anything's possible here. For a second I wondered if I could find a Julia-Roberts-style prostitute for Teddy to marry instead."

2. The book includes occasional "diary" entries from Heaven's enemies: "If only she weren't quite so beautiful. Even when she's bedraggled, she looks like some kind of royalty. It's not as if she's at peace -- her inner struggle is so visible, and it makes her face riveting. It's been so long since I felt threatened by another woman, but she's grown so close to Hiro after only a month." (157)

3. FREE TATTOOS IN THE BACK

What a great bad book.… (mehr)

Despite not being the most well written series of books, I've enjoyed the read until this book. This book was exceptionally sloppy written with little attention to the overall story and time line, where it seems that the author didn't remember what information had been given in earlier books. Deviations from earlier books, that couldn't be explained with that someone told Heaven another lie became just annoying - even if sometimes it was regarding very small details. E.g. wondering if the policeman that helped her in the previous book was still on the force, when she was gone about 1 week...how the recently cut bangs grew from very short to being in the eyes in little more than 1 week.

The other books in the series suffered sometimes of this as well, but not as bad as this book. Reading the article in WSJ (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122004548754784425.html#articleTabs%3Darticle), this is not so surprising but still disappointing. Equally disappointing was the ending of this book, which was built up as if there would be 1-2 more books to come.… (mehr)