My review of Moon Over Tokyo by Siri Mitchell...

From the Publisher:

Author Siri L. Mitchell (The Cubicle Next Door) invites readers to an exotic and mysterious land on a tender journey of self—discovery.

Though reporter Allie O'Connor has lived in Japan for two years, she still barely copes as a foreigner. After an office romance ends badly, she prays in her loneliness one moonlit night for a friend. Just a friend.

Soon after this prayer she runs into Eric Larson at church, an old classmate from high school. Eric has been assigned to the U.S. embassy and lives in Allie's district. In school he had been a young Republican. Allie had been a liberal Democrat. He is not the friend she was looking for. And yet...here she is. Here he is.

Will Allie risk their fledgling friendship to find out if it can become something more?

My review:

Once again Siri Mitchell has taken me as a reader to a foreign culture. An exotic place. Tokyo, Japan. And with that excursion came site seeing, food, religion, economics, and a fascinating interpretation of things in nature as seen through Japanese culture. Siri has a gift for making the reader transport to another location somewhere in the world. Whether it's Paris, like in Kissing Adrien, or Colorado, like in The Cubicle Next Door, or traveling Europe as in Chateau of Echoes and Something Beyond the Sky. That is one of the things I enjoy the most about her books. And she always has strong heroines with passion and convictions about something whether it's the use of drinking straws, or the perils of politics.

What I enjoy most about Siri's books as evidenced in Moon Over Tokyo as well as her other novels, is her amazing ability to draw out the tension in a first person POV romance. I always feel like I know the heroes even though they are only known through the heroine's perspective and the actions she sees. She also takes friendship between a man and a woman and draws it out until they fall in love. Her novels are always so romantic and charming that way. She also shows the heroine growing through her experiences and ending up deciding to trust, to risk her heart, to try love. I've yet to read a book Siri has written that I haven't thoroughly enjoyed. While this one had more detail than the others, I didn't find it annoying at all, but it did distract a bit from the tension in the story. She has her own brand, distinctly Siri. It's always exotic, fun, deep, and littered with every possible food unique to the culture. I'll never need to travel Europe or Japan because I've fully experienced them already through Siri's novels.

Moon Over Tokyo was published by Harvest House and released in July 2007.