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I thought this book was pretty stunning. I decided to read it after seeing John Warner (AKA The Biblioracle) say that it "should absolutely be considered a great American classic."

It has some flaws -- for example, I thought it was somewhat sexist and didn't always succeed when he was writing from a woman character's perspective (although the Dymphna Willson chapter, describing a detailed interaction between Dymphna and Bethera, was very good).

The chapter focused on David, a white student who becomes close friends with a black student at college, was amazing. I didn't realize it until reading this New Yorker article after I finished the book, but the entire story is told exclusively through the eyes of white people.

The image of all the black people leaving the state is really burned into my mind. (I don't think that plot development is a spoiler, since I've seen it prominently mentioned in many descriptions of the book.)

There is only one copy of this book in our library system, and the library that owns it won't let users from other libraries borrow it. :-( But luckily I was able to get it from the Cloud Library.

4.5 stars. I thought it would take me longer to finish this 600+ pager, but it really gripped me and kept me moving along. Excellent and exciting storytelling, focused on aviator Marian Graves, with great characters in both of the book’s timelines. Very well written -- for the most part, I’d say it’s filled with sentences that are a pleasure to read.

Some of Barclay’s actions (and the supposed reasoning behind them) didn’t really make sense to me, and that distracted me a bit. But it’s a fairly minor complaint, considering how much I liked the book overall.

Weaved into the story in both timelines are many memorable observations about friendship, love, adventure, heartache, sexual desire and pleasure, artistic expression, self-destruction, sexism, war, and atonement, not to mention aviation and film-making. There's also a cinematic sweep to the whole thing that is breathtaking at times (which I think is not always easy to do in writing), e.g. ships at sea, crossing mountains north of Montana and heading west to the Pacific, flying across Antarctica, etc.