Review: Circling the Sun

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of a several books I've read recently or am reading where I don't completely agree with myself about how I feel about it. I very much enjoyed this overall. I knew nothing about Beryl Markham, but I heard Paula McLain speak as this book was on the verge of being released last year, and I've rarely seen someone so passionate about her topic. It shows in her writing, as I felt like I knew Beryl as a best friend by the end of the book. The description of life in colonial East Africa was amazing, and I don't think the reader could avoid the feeling of being there in Kenya themselves if they wanted to. Beryl was hard to pin down, a fiercely independent person who lived in a time and place on the verge of major change when people women were just beginning to demonstrate that they could bring home the bacon AND fry it up in a pan...and definitely never let someone forget he's a man. I was both fascinated and a bit horrified at the degree of infidelity that was common among the British colonialists in Africa (sometimes known as the Happy Valley set), especially the fact that it was so accepted and even expected. McLain's portrayal of Beryl serves to make us sympathetic to this aspect of her life, minimizing it even. Beryl's relationships with the men in her life, starting with her father, were doubtless part of the foundation of her personality, the inspiration behind her need to explore fields normally reserved for men and even be the best at them. Her relationship with Denys Finch Hatton, and even Finch Hatton's longtime love Karen Blixen, was complex and complicated (and naturally, I now want to go read Out of Africa, which I never had interest in before, to get Karen's side of the story). And, of course, once I finished, I immediately went to read up a bit on Beryl and how her life might have been different from McLain's fictionalized version...and I came away a bit disappointed. I'm not sure I like the real Beryl very much, while I'd sort of admired the fictional version. I also have to note that I listened to the audio, and while the narration was okay, I didn't think it was great, especially the depiction of the male characters. But overall, this is a wonderful tribute to a person, a woman, who broke a number of glass ceilings before we even knew the term, alongside a bit of a love letter to the early days of the country we now know as Kenya. And it was lovely.

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