Out of Africa Again 
 Aviatrix Beryl Markham is remembered as the first person to fly the Atlantic westward from England to the American continent, but Paula McLain's bionovel mentions this only in the brief prologue and epilogue. Her main focus is on how this remarkable woman, growing up on a Kenyan stud farm and living up to then as a racehorse trainer, could change direction and take on such a challenge after only a few years' of solo flying herself. McClain's strength is to take us so completely into Beryl's mind that we see everything through her eyes, saddened by the setbacks that come her way, but inspired by her determination to overcome them. 
 The best parts of the book for me were the first hundred pages or so, describing the beautiful surroundings of her father's farm, her mother's defection to England, Beryl's virtual adoption by a local Kip chieftain, her tomboy childhood, and resistance to any formal schooling. This continues to her first marriage, at only 17, to the owner of the farm next door, who takes her when her father sells his property to avoid bankruptcy. It is not a happy marriage, partly due to sexual incompatibility, partly because none Beryl's husbands will be entirely comfortable with such an independent wife who insists on living her own life. Perhaps because of this, she soon has affairs--not many in number compared to the promiscuous ways of the notorious Happy Valley set, but things that would increasingly embroil her in scandal as her fame as a trainer increased. 
 Here the book begins to be peopled with names that are familiar from other sources: Baroness Karen Blixen, later the author (as Isaak Dinesen) of 
 Out of Africa 
 ; the big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, Blixen's lover and later Beryl's; Prince Harry, third son of King George V, and younger brother to the future Edward VIII and George VI--together with numerous other figures from the upper ranks of Kenyan colonial society that flit continually in and out. I found myself more interested in Beryl when she was unknown herself and associating with people who, whether real or not, do not come swathed in clouds of glamorous notoriety. I wondered whether this was not a typical case of the bionovelist pandering to an appetite for gossip, by making the most of every famous connection that came her way. Perhaps a little. Yet, reading up on Beryl Markham later, I see that all these things were true: she was indeed friends with Karen Blixen, she did have an affair with Finch Hatton, and whether true or not, rumor did associate her with Prince Harry, almost as notorious a playboy as his elder brother. 
 You could see all these things as detours for Beryl, still only in her early twenties, as she struggles to find her true self. Sometimes she almost gets lost in the struggle, but her indomitable spirit and underlying honesty still comes through. I guess we should see her triumph as a pilot as the final flowering of that true self, but that would be too simplistic; one gathers that this woman will continue searching, and not always finding, for the whole of her life. 
 Rating? At first I thought the prose a bit overwritten, but I soon settled into it, and found myself increasingly reluctant to put the story down. I could have done with a little less of the social whirl in the middle, but recognized that this was Beryl too. After reading Out of Africa (and seeing the movie), I am not sure that McClain had much to add to the portrait of Karen Blixen or her farm Mbogani, but there is eventually something rather touching in the way the two women come together in the realization that they have both loved an untamable man. Not having read it, I cannot say how much McLain draws on Markham's own memoir West with the Night. As she freely acknowledges the material, and her writing throughout has the energy of the novelist rather than the borrowings of a biographer, I am prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. When I posted this review originally on Amazon, I was between four stars and five, largely because I was so caught up in the story. But time, alas, and the strength of the competition, have knocked off a star. So three stars, but a high three.