The Russian Concubine by Kate Furnivall

Fiction - 4 stars - The best part about this book was the information I learned about pre-communist China. It is the story of a young Russian girl who went to China with her mother during the Bolshevik revolution. They lived in Junchow, in the mainly British settlement, and Furnivall depicts the financial disparity between the imperialist Brits and wealthy Chinese families and the Russian refugees and destitute Chinese. While it is ultimately a love story, it is definitely not a "romance" novel, and I would not call her a true concubine. In all, definitely worth reading.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Fiction - 3.5 stars - This book is truly a visual masterpiece. While the ending is a little weak, and the author is a man writing from a woman's perspective (I'm not even going to scratch the surface of the problems with this), all of the stars go to the use of description in this novel. The movie portrayed this visual beauty very well, but the book was even more of a "movie" as it was truly vivid.