Daisy's review
Geisha: A Life
by Mineko Iwasaki, Rande Brown
Daisy's review
Geisha: A Life by Mineko Iwasaki, Rande Brown
Daisy's review
rating:
bookshelves:
finished
As much as I enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha, I thought this autobiography, by the actual geisha the book was based on, would be amazing. She apparently wrote it in response to Golden's book, which Wikipedia informs me pissed her off, as she felt it was incorrect and misrepresented the true geisha culture.
However, the book is obviously ghost-written, which would be fine if it was by someone who was a better writer. Even though the story is interesting, the writing is choppy, clunky and uneven. Plus, I couldn't help but notice the overuse of hyperbole, especially since the overstatements were usually contradicted. "I never had a day off in five years," she would write and then immediately tell two stories about being so sick that she ended up in the hospital for 10 days. "I had no friends!" would be followed by stories about going on Hawaiian vacations with 'friends'. I found that to be very distracting from the larger story and a definite minus from the overa...more
However, the book is obviously ghost-written, which would be fine if it was by someone who was a better writer. Even though the story is interesting, the writing is choppy, clunky and uneven. Plus, I couldn't help but notice the overuse of hyperbole, especially since the overstatements were usually contradicted. "I never had a day off in five years," she would write and then immediately tell two stories about being so sick that she ended up in the hospital for 10 days. "I had no friends!" would be followed by stories about going on Hawaiian vacations with 'friends'. I found that to be very distracting from the larger story and a definite minus from the overa...more
