This book is loosely based on the life of Margaret Mead. So I hear; I don’t know enough about her to have recognized that on my own, so it wasn’t a distraction to me. It might be if your perspective is different. Also, there are (apparently — again, I didn’t catch them on my own) some pretty elementary factual errors. To me, whatever: what I didn’t know didn’t hurt me, and in some ways this story could have been set anywhere, provided that anywhere was unfamiliar to and perhaps not altogether safe for our main characters.
That being said, <—and that’s where I left off seven months ago. I recall drawing mental comparisons to The Poisonwood Bible, but also may be inventing that. If memory serves, and it so often doesn’t, there’s academic and marital jealousy, the question of what it means to be an outsider…as an anthropologist and/or as a person in a not-great relationship? I think I’ll read it again.
