Euphoria

Good pacing, richly drawn characters, and a well-developed setting. Really liked the biographical elements and the depiction of 20th-century anthropology in far-flung New Guinea, but I was constantly wondering what came straight from the life of Margaret Mead and what Lily King added or changed for the story.

Along with the romantic themes and central love triangle, Euphoria is a novel of ideas as well, with the three main characters representing their cultural attributes (English, American, Australian) in their approaches to science, and mapping neatly (a bit too neatly?) to the Sepik tribes they're all investigating.