Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m late to the party discovering Paula McLain, but I’m delighted to have found her. Having just come off reading The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. I don’t read a lot of historical fiction based on fact, and the South African setting isn’t something I’m familiar with, but all I can say is “This book is phenomenal.”
McLain’s greatest gift as a storyteller is her ability to put the reader firmly in the head of the narrator. In Circling the Sun, we feel Beryl’s pain and her passion, her strength and her all-too-human weaknesses, we see the landscape, the dirt, and mud and the dust, through her eyes…but mostly we admire a woman who lived life on her own terms, often at great personal cost, in a time when few women did that.
If you haven’t discovered Paula McLain yet, I urge you to do so. You won’t be disappointed.