If You Could Be Mine is a moving story about what you want but you can't have, and asks how far you are willing to go to get it.

It's about heartbreak; it's about grief; it's about determination and enduring love; it's about queerness; it's about homophobia; it's about gender; it's about transsexuality; it's about friendship and stolen glances; it's about the clash between legal and cultural acceptance; it's about class difference and privilege; it's about women and girls; it's about family; it's about identity; but mostly, it's about being a queer teenage girl in a country where it's hard to be a girl and even harder to be queer. This novel touches upon many important and moving themes, and Sahar's narration handles the themes the way one would expect a young queer girl would.

The characters feel authentic and believable, though not always likeable, and they all bring important elements to the story. The relationships are messy and complicated, but in a realistic way. The plot felt a bit slow, the main intriguing aspect of the story only coming in about half-way through, though the introduction did provide a lot of important context. The ending could have explored more aspects of the story better, but was ultimately very fitting.

Farizan's style isn't anything remarquable, but isn't bad. There are some beautifully poetic, yet sparse, lines, but otherwise the narration is rather simple and sometimes blunt, though it fits the narration quite well. It feels quite like a diary, which makes the story even more intimate.

If You Could Be Mine, though fictional, is an important reminder of how many real queer people still cannot live their love and identities openly and without discrimination, and is therefore an important book, even though it looks at these struggles somewhat superficially and not necessarily through a political lense. It may be average in some of its aspects, but it is definitely worth reading.

Geisha, a Life is an extremely interesting memoir detailing the inner workings of a very misunderstood profession, that of the geisha.

As a European, I am not familiar with traditional Japanese culture, and so this memoir was nice way to dip my toe into it. Mineko portrays her life and career in extreme detail (which sometimes seems also too detailed to have been remembered that way), providing insight into not only the different aspects of the geiko profession, such a dance, music, and the social conventions, but also into global and Japanese history, ranging from politics to popular culture. She often shuts down the common stereotype of geisha being prostitutes, and puts a lot emphasis on geisha's cultural expertise. She mingled accounts of her personal life mostly quite well with general cultural and historical digressions, which provide a fuller view of the world of Gion Kobu.

The writing style is simple, sometimes even quite blunt, but agreeable. Some subject changes, however, felt quite abrupt, which were probably worsened by the formatting of the ebook.

I feel like I learned a lot of things from this memoir, though I wonder how much has changed in Gion Kobu in the 23 years since its publication. Mineko already mentioned in the novel herself that some of the traditional art forms were dying out, and I truly hope they are being preserved as much as possible.

In short, Mineko Iwasaki's memoir Geisha, a Life is very interesting content-wise, however there are some stylistic elements which can often be quite perturbing.