Blog Tour, Giveaway, and Book Review: The Tokyo Cover Girls

The Tokyo Cover Girls
Jackie Amsden
(The Tokyo Cover Girls , #1)
Publication date: April 28th 2016
Genres: Mystery, Young Adult

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New York has Jacobs, Paris has Chanel, Milan has Versace and Tokyo has . . . Hello Kitty toilet plungers? With its cute-obsessed catalogue and magazine market, anyone who is anyone knows that modeling in Japan means being at the bottom of the fashion industry. Blake, Jess, and Hailey are doing their best to survive yet another casting where pigtails and toddler-impressions are a must when they stumble upon the opportunity of a lifetime. The prestigious Satsujin company has selected them to compete for a campaign that will transform the winner from commercial nobody to haute couture superstar faster than you can say Vogue Italia.

Of course, nothing is ever what it seems in the fashion world. Just ask all those dead girls . .

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jackie Amsden worked as a fashion model in China, Japan, and Taiwan before retiring at the age of eighteen after one too many agent threats, nude photo shoot requests, and self-loathing-induced Pocky binges. If you’d like to learn more about her decent into the darker side of Asia’s candy-coated modeling industry sign up for free installments of her upcoming memoir and get updates about the sequel to The Tokyo Cover Girls at http://www.jackieamsden.com.

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GIVEAWAY:  CLICK HERE!

 

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Quick Reasons: intriguing, entertaining plot; GAAAAAH so much girl hate, whyyyy?!; I was expecting…something different?; slightly disappointed, honestly; some weird typos and missing letters/words throughout; kind of a weird, unresolved ending

creeptastic!

I’m disappointed

entertaining

devoured it

Huge thanks to Jackie Amsden and Giselle @ Xpresso Book Tours for sending me a copy of this title in exchange for an honest review! This in no way altered my read of or opinions on this book.

So…this wasn’t QUITE what I was expecting, going into this read, and I’m just slightly disappointed about it. I was expecting models and mayhem and murder and intrigue and…. instead, I feel like I got a few minor blips on an otherwise fairly calm radar. Don’t get me wrong–the plot was intriguing, and entertaining, but… I wasn’t nearly as hooked as I thought I’d be. I also wasn’t nearly as enthralled as I’d hoped. There wasn’t, in the end, a whole lot of modeling. There also wasn’t a whole lot of murder. This was more like…flipping on an episode of America’s Next Top Model and instead realizing you’re watching Say Yes to the Dress. I don’t know if that analogy makes sense to anyone but me, but the point is, I went into this read expecting excitement and mayhem and instead got a lot of whining and complaining and stress-eating.

The ending of this book also felt a bit…incomplete. I mean, I KNOW that this is only the first book in the series, so obviously there are going to be unresolved questions and unexplained foreshadows, BUT. The ending for this? Didn’t really give me any semblance of an “ending.” I don’t know if that makes sense… I got to the ending, and was expecting at least another chapter–we aren’t even sure, at the end, if the “bad guy” is gone or if this is only the beginning. And while I don’t have a problem with cliffhanger endings…this one just felt a bit stiff and awkward to me, I guess.

BUT! The plot was super intriguing, and while there was a LOT of girl-hate going on throughout this book (man, these girls were catty. I mean, sure, they’re models, but HOLY PENGUINS, women, cool yourselves!), I was also pretty entertained throughout. There are quite a few typos and missing letters/words, which made some of the sentences awkward or difficult to read…and most of the characters, unfortunately, turned out to be pretty 1-dimensional in my mind. I still had a TON of fun reading, though, and will probably pick up book two in the future because I’m curious to see what the girls get up to on their next journey.

Overall, this was a quirky and entertaining read that, while disappointing in the end, kept me turning the pages. I wasn’t a fan of all the girl-hate, but the plot was intriguing, and I’m interested in seeing what happens in book two. I’d recommend this to lovers of dramatic mysteries, high-maintenance characters, and just a hint of an unresolved ending. Jackie Amsden kept me guessing with this book–maybe you should give it a chance, too!