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Title: "Restless Hearts"
Review: "Memoirs of a Geisha" is a (mostly) critically and popularly acclaimed novel, marketed as a top-notch piece of "historical fiction." For that reason, I purchased a copy and read it through to its end. I wish, however, this book had been entitled "Restless Hearts" (or something similar), as I then would have understood that what I was about to read was actually a romance novel with a "historical" setting. As to how accurate the novel is in portraying the lives of WWII-era Geisha, I cannot say, as I am neither Japanese, nor a Geisha, nor a WWII-era Japanese Geisha historian. But even assuming that Golden gets his history right, his book is still filled with two-dimensional characters, adolescent themes, and bad plot contrivances. I give it two stars because I enjoyed the writing style. But a well-written book does not necessarily make the story within worth reading.
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