Please note I received this book free from the audiobook producers for review purposes.
What can I say? I finished listening to this so the “Cherry Blossom Girls” did entertain me. A large part of that entertainment came from the full cast narration but the story it self felt very quite awkward. It read like part embarrassing wish fulfillment or self insert erotica and part solid fun action.
The plot, in a nutshell, is that an unsuccessful self published author finds at his doorstep a naked girl with superpowers. Action and government conspiracies ensue. A second superpowered girl gets involved and some very awkward, detailed, and out of place sex scenes happen.
The motivations of the girls are not clear. Why do they like this guy? Why are they pretty much doing whatever he says? Why are they attracted to him? The answer seems to be just for this to be wish fulfillment fantasy for the reader. I don’t have a problem with that as a concept but even in this kind of power fantasy you need to give some actual reasons for the characters to act the way they do. Some personality. That’s really lacking in this story.
There are also some detailed descriptions of the self publishing world of Amazon and the life of a selfpublished author. These were actually pretty cool and I really enjoyed the minutia. Write what you know, I guess?
But still the story did entertain me and keep my attention. Trashy, but fun trashy. The uh… Fact that a self published author is writing a sex fantasy about a self published author does make it a bit of an embarrassing read. Think “Twilight” or “Fifty Shades of Gray” embarrassing…
The audiobook version has solid performances. Nothing really stand-out but also nothing grating. On a purely technical side the audio quality was fine but sometimes the relative volume between the different narrators was off. There were also like… Two places where they used sound effects which felt odd because those were the only places where that happened. When after an hour or two of pure narration get a voice effect for a shower, that really stands out. But overall good work that added to the book instead of subtracting from it.