This book has a hold on me for reasons that I can't fully articulate - Mary is just a very engaging character and I find it hard to put down once I pick it up. It's certainly a fine example of a man writing a convincing female PoV (turns out it's not that hard to write an entire novel without your female character musing on the size of her breasts). 

It's an epistolary piece,  told through letters and Mary's intermittent journals, covering a period of about 40 years. We do skip through long periods of time at certain points, but we hit the important beats of Mary's life and the times she's living through, and get a real sense of her growing and forging her own identity and success as a woman living far from home.

Being set in the first part of the 20th century and written in the 70s, there are defintely things in it that would be construed as racist with a modern lens, but it doesn't feel hateful or malicious to me.