"Becoming George Sand" is the story of Dr. Maria Jameson, a Scottish university professor, who is writing a book about the life of French author George Sand (nee Aurore Dupin). Her marriage is falling apart, due in no small part to her affair with another professor, and one of her friends is seriously ill. It seems as though Maria just cannot get her act together.The book was extremely slow to start and, I must confess, I nearly abandoned it. However, I am glad I stuck with it because things get very interesting about a third of the way in. Maria starts gaining insight into her own actions the more she studies the life of George Sand for her own work.The book occasionally takes Sand's perspective and, frankly, those sections were the most interesting to me. Brackenbury lapses between present and past tense for no apparent reason (which is to I could not divine the pattern that she used to make this choice), which was a trifle distracting.
