Tokyo Dreaming follows Japanese-American Izumi Tanaka as she tries to navigate her royal life as a princess of Japan. She thinks she has everything worked out --- she's used to the gossip magazines, she has a handsome bodyguard-boyfriend, and her parents are engaged.

It's a dream come true, only that the Imperial Household Council refuses to approve her parents' marriage citing concerns about Izumi and her mother’s lack of pedigree. At the threat of everything falling apart, Izumi vows to do whatever it takes to help win over the council. Which means upping her newly acquired princess game. But at what cost?

Although this novel is a sequel of Tokyo Ever After, both can be read as standalone, as the sequel does a good job of explaining the important events in Book 1.

What I did like:
-Book 1 had a very typical, "girls are mean to our new protagonist who doesn't really understand her surroundings yet," but I did like that this novel fixed that relationship between Izumi and her twin cousins. It gave them more character than the typical mean girls.

What I didn't like:
-The extremely overrated love triangle --- Akio was gone for half of the novel, there was development between the new love interest and Izumi (fake-dating turned REAL DATING just who could have seen that coming!), and then Akio comes back at the very end and she chooses him anyway.

-The so very cliche one liners dropped onto the pages (the novel literally ends with "Life is a poem. I am going to write it." :/ )

-The sudden talk of Izumi's identity between being a princess, and being just regular old her. The appearance of her best friend had to be the one to point it out to her near the end. It would have worked if Izumi was way more aware of this divide earlier in the plot.

Overall, I enjoyed the female relationships this book had to offer, but the overly cliche, wish-fulfillment nature of this book just made me bored.