🍦 🍓 The Ripped Bodice's 9th Annual Summer Romance Bingo 🕶️ 🏄🏼

/ Historical Ruins

I don't know why I requested this. It's giving weeb. I have nothing nice to say, so I shouldn't say anything at all, but before I get to that, all of the katana sword and obi belt references, of which there are many, and others, are giving chai tea. Impale me on said katana sword.

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Perennial

Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Perennial for providing this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I unfortunately had to DNF this one. Life is too short to spend it pushing through books that are just not working for you.

I could not get into this book no matter how hard I tried, which sucks because it has such an interesting premise.

This book made it onto my TBR as soon as I saw the gorgeous cover and read the synopsis. I love historical fiction and this had a smidge of fantasy which made it even more up my alley.

Unfortunately, this book did not live up to my expectations. It reads like YA but is being marketed as an adult book. Also, there are scenes related to the romance that don't belong in YA so at best, there is an issue with what genre this book actually is.

You have to suspend your disbelief for a lot of the plot to make any sense in this one as well which is to be expected somewhat with time travel stories but this really made very little sense logically. The main character disappears for multiple months and then randomly reappears in 2005 - there would definitely be more questions.

I loved the historical references and wish the story had leaned more into that. That was the best part of the story by far.

Overall, I would probably not read any sequels to this book nor would I read more from this author. The concept was interesting but the execution fell flat.

⭐️⭐️

Time travel, historical Japan setting, samurai, romance, and a dash of war. This book has a lot to offer and it’s also the first in a series. I can’t wait to see the next installment.

# Gate to Kagoshima (Ancestor Memories, #1)
# 5/6/2025 ~ 5/8/2025
# 5.0 / 5.0

4/5 stars
Dark secrets, ancient portals, and Japanese mythology collide in Gate to Kagoshima by Poppy Kuroki. This fantasy thriller blends rich culture with suspense and supernatural intrigue—perfect for fans of fast-paced plots and eerie atmospheres.

Loved the immersive setting and the twisty storyline that kept me guessing. A few slower moments, but the payoff is worth it. If you like folklore-infused mystery with a touch of horror, this one’s for you!

Thank you to Harper Perennial, NetGalley, and the author for an advanced reader copy of this book.

Hmmmn… what to say about this book….

First, I would like to point out that appreciate the research into the history and it’s clear the author loves the culture.

I’m not here to say who can write what stories and what voices should be heard. I will say that this book felt like going to a museum. In a way that feels cold and disconnected. Kind of like being a spectator instead of being immersed. Which is unfortunate because that is literally what is supposed to be happening to the MC. I was never sucked in to this, like it had the potential of doing, as well I felt like the writing was choppy and the story disjointed. At the end I felt confused and a little let down.

This is one of those books that the cover made me grab it! I was immediately drawn into it and then seeing it be comped with "The Hurricane Wars" and "Outlander", I knew I had to check it out! Isla is transported back in time to the last Samurai era, a time of history I did not know much about. During her travels, she meets villagers willing to show her around and allow them to stay with her. While reading, I enjoyed watching Kai and Isla's relationship unfold on the pages, however being told the history of the Samurais, I also had a feeling of apprehension. I enjoyed Poppy Kuroki's detailed settings and characters as they navigated this time in history. Thank you to Harper Perennial for an advanced copy! All thoughts and opinions are my own!

This cover is just so pretty and the edges are gorgeous too! Time travel and Asian fantasies are two of my very favorite tropes/genres in books. I loved the Outlander vibes. The story was so interesting. I did not want to put the book down. Isla was researching her family's history in Japan when a typhoon whooshes her 128 years in the past. The romance of the story was so sweet. I enjoyed the relationships with the side characters. I cannot wait to read more from this author. Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Perennial and Paperbacks for the arc in exchange for my honest review.

I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

Honestly I'm disappointed. This held such potential but everything is so surface level that it lacks the nuance something this pivotal in history should have been. As someone who has lived in Japan I'm harsher when books like this come up and for a character who is of Japanese descent, speaks some Japanese, to have all these moments of "oh i forgot they switch the first and last names" basic 101 BS really grated on my nerves. There were so many moments that were written for English readers rather than making it make sense for the character that I was aggravated with Isla. Also, it's a bit self-insert especially when the author uses their last name as the ancestors last name. Kind of unnecessary.

Then of course there was the romance that was soooo flat and just kind of exists and the absolutely unnecessary "spicy" scenes.

And then...the ending...no. Just absolutely no. I hate that she literally slept with that guys ancestor and now there's an attraction in modern times??????? That was just lazy. A lot of this writing felt very lazy and without care.

Also in what universe would you comp this title with The Hurricane Wars??? Just because it's Asian???? If anything they could have said this was Last Samurai meets Outlander cuz that's what it is but with poorly crafted characters and adding nothing really to the historical significance of the Satsuma Rebellion. Huge letdown.

Gate to Kagoshima is a historical fiction debut novel by Poppy Kuroki. I really love the premise of the book which follows a young, Scottish exchange student, who studies abroad in Japan and is searching for information on her (multiple) great grandfather. I really wanted to like this book as it seemed like a really unique take on Japanese history, that could be both educational and interesting. However, I have very mixed thoughts on the overall novel.

Plot: Isla is an exchange student visiting Kagoshima, Japan to learn about her family's history (Scottish but a quarter Japanese), when she is transported back in time to the Satsuma Rebellion. As she struggles to find her way back to her own time she meets Keiichirō, a young samurai fighting in the rebellion.

Historical setting: The book takes place during the Satsuma Rebellion in Satsuma, a city in present day Kagoshima, which is in the southern part of Kyushu. I think the historical aspect of this book was well researched and I really enjoyed learning about the Satsuma rebellion. I won’t say much because the book is all about it, but the general gist of the rebellion is about preserving the samurai warrior class. If that sounds interesting to you I would definitely recommend this book.

Characters:
Isla - a Scottish-Japanese person who comes to Japan to learn about her culture and family history, and also to run away from her ex

Keiichiro - a samurai from the Satsuma Rebellion

While I did say I liked the historical aspect of the book I really was not a fan of the characters. I found them to be very flat and boring. They don’t have a whole lot of depth, for example, Isla brings up her ex boyfriend a decent amount yet that issue is never expanded on to create character growth but to justify her going to Japan. I will say that I found the ending to be really intriguing, and the best part of the book. However, I don’t think that one should have to wait until the last two chapters of a book before becoming invested in the characters. For a book that is marketed as romance as well I found it to be a bit lacking. It's quite insta lovey and honestly I don’t even know how they fell in love. All of a sudden it just happens and it's not shown in the book very well. My other big issue of the book was with the writing. There was sooooooooooo much telling and not showing. Throughout all my schooling, teachers constantly preach show not tell
I think that a lot of my issues with this book were personal, so I would still be willing to recommend this book to people willing to learn about Japanese history. However, I would warn them that this book feels more YA than adult, as it is advertised.

I would rate this book 2.5 stars, but because it was a debut novel, I am rounding up to 3 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Perennial for giving me an eARC.

She was here on a mission: to find her third-great-grandfather’s history.

Gate to Kagoshima was a time travel historical fiction feeling, through internal observation and introspection of 1877 cultural Kagoshima Japan, with a romantic element story. Isla grew up in Scotland but has ancestral roots in Japan, roots that she feels a pull to search for more information about. When she has some free time from her study aboard courses in Tokyo, she takes a trip to Kagoshima. Armed with some vague knowledge that her third great grandfather was one of the famed Samurai of the Satsuma Rebellion, she travels there to try and research more about him. Only she gets more than she bargained for when she gets lost exploring a shrine and goes from 2005 to 1877.

Isla tried to remind herself that Takamori Saigō died one hundred and twenty-eight years ago, along with the rest of the last samurai, but knowing this didn’t make the man she was staring at seem either a fluke or trick.

The first half of this was somewhat slow going, it leaned heavily into the historical fiction aspects. I enjoyed the mixture of real life historical figures and events with fictional characters but, as this was told mostly from Isla's point-of-view, with Maeda Keiichirō having a good amount of pov passages and then one or two from other secondary characters, most of the story was told from inside her head, relaying her thoughts about what she was seeing. This was more observational introspection, with not much dialogue (we do get more in the second half). I like inclusion of historical elements but this felt like focusing on the research for spouting facts purpose; it was a story about setting instead of characters, readers who came for a more character journey would struggle with this first half.

History was unfolding before her eyes.

The story did get going with the time travel right away, Isla was in 1877 by 20% in and she met Keiichirō right away. He gets tasked with sheltering her and watching her as they think she could be a spy. After Isla integrates herself into the community life a bit, the second half did pick up some steam with the historical march and fighting at Kumamoto Castle. There we get some jarring, for what the tone of the story felt like previously, gory scenes of death and fighting and Isla worrying over Keiichirō. The romance wasn't really romancing for me as it wasn't too focused on in the first half and then the second half just kind of tries to force the reader that they feel this incredible love for each other. In his own words Keiichirō summed it up for me: They had never touched unless by accident, or talked about deeply personal things, or even stared into each other’s eyes. And yet Keiichirō knew his life would be less if Isla wasn’t there, and her absence would be like draining all the colour from the world. He just knew.
You're just supposed to know that they have this intense love, because there wasn't any development for it.

The rain pelted the hillside, the torii gate waiting on top.

The latter second half had some awkward time jumps, feeling like jumbled scenes together, an open-door scene that also did not feel like it fit at all, and some reveals. One of the reveals involved Keiichirō's sister and it honestly was so incredibly not needed and because of the time period I'm living in right now, it felt pointed jammed in a way that had my hackles raising all the way up. I'll put what it was in spoiler tags [Years ago when Keiichirō's dad found his sister pregnant, she told him that she was raped. The dad slices the rapist's throat in his sleep, which makes the killing not honorable and so as a samurai, the dad commits seppuku, kills himself. Towards the end it's found out that the sister lied about the rape to hide her promiscuity and there's some relaying at how this lying destroys so many people. Just personally not in the mood for this kind of messaging when we know the percentages of fake rape accusations and prevalence of rape (hide spoiler)] If this doesn't raise your hackles, you'd probably not have the bad taste in your mouth like I did towards the end.
The ending stayed true to the real historical event and the romance gave a Knight in Shining Armour by Jude Deveraux-ish end. The first half was slow paced but could interest observational historical fiction readers but the second half and ending was a jumbled mess of pace, tone, and scenes.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishing Company for this Advanced Readers copy of Gate to Kagoshima by Poppy Kuroki!

This was an interesting book. It had so much premise, but fell flat for me unfortunately. To compare it to outlander is a huge stretch, beyond the aspect of time travel. It lacks the same amount of depth and character development. I would give this 3.5 stars. I’d like to see greater plot development and a less forced romance, if romance at all (it seemed like an afterthought).

4 stars and my thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for the eARC!

Y'all. I read 60% of this at the bar the night prior to writing this review while my family played poker.

Isla is in Japan searching for her family history, believing a however many greats grandfather was one of the last samurai to make a stand against what ended up being modernity in the country. She visits a shrine and finds herself thrown back in time to a month before war breaks out. Struggling with trying to get back to her time and dealing with burgeoning feelings for a quiet samurai, Isla has to figure out if she should share what she knows from the future or if history needs to play out as written.

I'll start with what I didn't like to get it out of the way: The repetition. I feel like inner monologues repeated themselves a lot, both with Isla and with Keiichiro. It probably could have done with some more editing. It's not Kuroki's first novel, but it reads like it. I also felt like the characters are supposed to be college age or even early 20s, but they read as immature 16 year olds at times. Keiichiro and his friends are still playing pranks and getting into trouble when they're supposed to be grown men? Ok.

What I loved: Keiichiro. 100% the best part of the story. 10/10 no notes on this man. We love a man who knows his duty and feels terrible for choosing it first. We love a man who is soft and caring but also knows how to fucking kill a man. Isla and Keiichiro's romance was so sweet and lovely that even a wrinkle like an arranged marriage didn't slow it down by much. Also, that ending! I need more. Gimme more.

Gate to Kagoshima is a historical romance, very Outlander meets “The Last Samurai”. I appreciated the author’s deft hand at centering the story in its two timelines (though there’s a part of me that’s devastated to see the 2000s are historical enough to be a time placed in history with relics of old such as the Motorola Razr flip phone), and the thematic throughline of our protagonist, Isla, seeking out answers about her heritage and where a part of her comes from.
However, my enjoyment of the novel was hindered by several other factors. Odd as it may sound, Kagoshima was a little too readable; the prose was so simplistic that it moved from an invisible vehicle by which to consume a story, one that required no remark one way or another, into something that aged down the book and made it feel like it was for a much younger audience. Were it not for the warfare and sex scenes, I’d call this novel accessible to middle-grade readers, and not nearly nuanced enough to get across the more harrowing elements of the story to its YA or adult audiences.
This disconnect colored other elements of the story as well. The pacing of the novel was quick, which it had to be to cover the several elapsed months of the rebellion, but that left little to no room for “showing” characters’ emotional arcs or doing more than telling that time had passed. It was hard to feel a sense of narrative urgency while reading because Isla’s goal throughout was just… waiting. Waiting to meet her ancestor if possible, waiting to get back to her own time. She had no intermediary goals to carry her between any of those points, and she ended up just being swept along into a war that I as a reader had no time to begin caring about.
I wish Isla had been more proactive in figuring out about her ancestor instead of having the answer of it all fall into her lap. 2005 is modern enough that she should’ve been able to guess that she might be something of a “reverse ghost”, complete with western ideas of ghosts having unfinished business that prevents them from moving on. The things she’d do would make her more of an outsider, yes, but I need my protagonist to have some goal or agency or something to carry their own story. As it was, I couldn’t tell if Kuroki wanted to write a romance centering Isla and the samurai Kei or just a creative nonfiction piece about the Satsuma rebellion, because as soon as it was possible, the focus shifted to the latter in a way that made any bit of romance we got later on feel forced/out of place/surprising rather than satisfying. The scenes of warfare were a good change of pace in that they showed the interruption to life and accumulation of trauma, but because we were following an outsider instead of someone in Satsuma who had seen these sentiments brewing, it felt like it all happened so fast with no time to mourn characters we barely got to know anyway. By trying to play both games, I felt Gate to Kagoshima failed to deliver on either.
Because of these large scale problems, I was more aware of smaller gripes throughout the story that I may otherwise have handwaved.
The worldbuilding element of the time travel Yoshii gate not being tied to a specific location broke my immersion in that speculative fiction element (there has to be rules to the magic!). It could have been a good way to save Kei while the rebellion was failing—he needs to escort Isla back to the temple to be able to go home— but instead it just? Appears wherever? And sends Isla straight back to where she came from? And it only sometimes needs a storm to work, and sometimes it makes a musical sound you can follow. There was also inconsistency with the use of the honorifics, where some have dashes and some run into the name that they follow in a way that made the story just a little harder to read. Finally, I just felt the story hit one too many Outlander beats, down to calling Isla a gaijin, and I’m just not a fan when books are too similar to comp titles.

Dnf at 56%.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion. The Gate to Kagoshima is a time traveling romance story about a girl named Isla who travels back in time to feudal Japan. When Isla gets randomly transported back to feudal Japan she meets Keichiro, a young samurai man who is trying to figure out whether or not she is a spy. The premise of the book sounded amazing and it was being compared to Outlander, which I really love. However, I feel that this story fell flat. The story isn’t horrible, but I think I just didn’t care what was happening to them. I also think the story rushes the plot along without really building character relationships. The writing felt underdeveloped, and there was this push that Isla and Keichiro liked each other without really giving us time to see that happen. I think if we had more detailed chapters showing Isla’s time with Keichiro and his village, showing a bond growing between the two it would have made the story so much more enjoyable.

I have mixed feelings and emotions about this book. On one hand, I really liked the Japanese culture and the history. The ending had me emotional and I even shed a few tears, it was so heartfelt and beautiful. But the other part of me hated the Kana reveal and how her brother believed an enemy over her. And then to just be like I believed him so now you need to admit it to me? It just felt so gross and my heart was just so broken for Kana. And then it broke again for the unnecessary murders that were a result of it. I did enjoy the writing though and I would definitely read future books by this author.

I saw that this was a Japanese historical romantasy, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to read it. The book felt well-researched, and it was fascinating to dive into another culture’s history.

Isla Mackenzie’s trip to Japan takes a very unexpected turn when a typhoon sweeps her 128 years into the past, to the Satsuma Rebellion. There, she meets her ancestors and Kei, a charismatic samurai who captures her heart. With her knowledge of Kei’s doomed fate, Isla must choose to either alter history or find her way back home.

I felt like the book dragged on a bit in the middle, but I loved how everything wrapped up in the end, with all loose ends tied up nicely.

This is what I would consider a historical romance primarily taking place during the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877.
* Likes
* Enjoyed learning more about Japanese culture.
* I appreciate the effort that went into learning about the history and placing these fictional characters within that history.
* Back of book includes a bunch of information on the history and the time lines of actual events.
* Dislikes
* A bit repetitive. We understand her mission.
* Unnatural dialogue.
* Serious overuse mentioning the sprained ankle.
* There are a lot of Random happenings that feel more like an afterthought when you run through a draft with a decision change and have to make it make sense.
* I wanted more show and less tell. Rather than telling me that the main character was nervous show me what nervousness felt like. The sweaty palms and the increased heart rate. That would’ve have helped me have a more emotional connection with the characters.

Overall I would recommend this to anyone who isn’t super critical when reading. If things like sentence structure don’t bother you, I think the story is worth it. Poppy has pulled beautiful fictional characters into this historically accurate story.