Book Reviews/A Writing Journey
Tag: books
When Sayuri is a child in a poor fishing village, she is sold into slavery to a Kyoto geisha house. As she grows, she is groomed to become a geisha and is soon visiting teahouses dressed in fine kimonos and competing with a jealous rival.
Continue reading “Arthur Golden’s — Memoirs of a Geisha *****”
Two sisters, Pearl and May, lead exciting lives in Shanghai until their father’s once rich lifestyle is gambled away. Their father is forced to sell his daughters as wives to men in California seeking wives. Escaping from invading soldiers, they journey across to U.S.A. to begin new lives with the strangers they’ve married. This is Lisa See at her best.
Another five out of five is her Lady Tan’s Circle of Women. Set in Wuxi in the 1400s, Yunxian is sent to her grandparents after her mother dies and her father leaves to study for an exam. When Grandmother Ru sees the potential in her granddaughter, she begins to share her medical knowledge with Yunxian until it is time for her marriage. Under her mother-in-law, she is forbidden to practise medicine, but Yunxian cannot bear to see other women suffer because male doctors can only question women behind a curtain, thus leading to many unsuccessful diagnoses.
Set within a rich Chinese family’s compound, with customs such as seclusion of women and foot binding, this is a tale of Tan Yunxian’s life against all the richness of the times.
Natalie lives in Finland and researches Envall—the founder of an extremist Protestant sect that she came into contact with thirty years earlier. As a thirteen year old, she had met Barbara whose family was sect followers. This community not only changed her life, but her face.
This is a history of Queensland’s early European settlement that I was never taught. The novel documents an era during the 1800s when pastoralists claimed millions of hectares of Queensland’s interior for cattle and sheep grazing. When Aborigines objected, speared a sheep or approached waterholes they’d used for thousands of years, graziers either demanded the native police “disperse” the Aborigines or killed most of the tribe themselves.
Continue reading “Timothy Bottoms’ — Conspiracy of Silence *****”
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