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Little America III, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica March 4, 1950

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge—a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.

I’m about to depart. I will try to pull the circle up from below, bringing the end to meet the beginning. I wish the line were a smooth meridian, a perfect, taut hoop, but our course was distorted by necessity: the indifferent distribution of islands and airfields, the plane’s need for fuel.

I don’t regret anything, but I will if I let myself. I can think only about the plane, the wind, and the shore, so far away, where land begins again. The weather is improving. We’ve fixed the leak as best we can. I will go soon. I hate the never-ending day. The sun circles me like a vulture. I want a respite of stars.

Circles are wondrous because they are endless. Anything endless is wondrous. But endlessness is torture, too. I knew the horizon could never be caught but still chased it. What I have done is foolish; I had no choice but to do it.

[ Return to the review of “Great Circle.” ]

It isn’t how I thought it would be, now that the circle is almost closed, the beginning and end held apart by one last fearsome piece of water. I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. I thought I would believe I’d completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed. I thought I would not be afraid. I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.

No one should ever read this. My life is my one possession.

And yet, and yet, and yet.

Los Angeles December 2014

I only knew about Marian Graves because one of my uncle’s girlfriends liked to dump me at the library when I was a kid, and one time I picked up a random book called something like Brave Ladies of the Sky. My parents had gone up in a plane and never come back, and it turned out a decent percentage of the brave ladies had met the same fate. That got my attention. I think I might have been looking for someone to tell me a plane crash wasn’t such a bad way to go—though if anyone actually ever had, I would have thought they were full of shit. Marian’s chapter said she’d been raised by her uncle, and when I read that, I got goose bumps because I was being raised (kind of) by my uncle.

A nice librarian dug up Marian’s book for me—The Sea, the Sky, etc.—and I pored over it like an astrologist consulting a star chart, hopeful that Marian’s life would somehow explain my own, tell me what to do and how to be. Most of what she wrote went over my head, though I did come away with a vague aspiration to turn my loneliness into adventure. On the first page of my diary, I wrote “I WAS BORN TO BE A WANDERER” in big block letters. Then I didn’t write anything else because how do you follow that up when you’re ten years old and spend all your time either at your uncle’s house in Van Nuys or auditioning for television commercials? After I returned the book, I pretty much forgot about Marian. Almost all of the brave ladies of the sky are forgotten, really. There was the occasional spooky TV special about Marian in the ’80s, and a handful of die-hard Marian enthusiasts are still out there spinning theories on the internet, but she didn’t stick the way Amelia Earhart did. People at least think they know about Amelia Earhart, even though they don’t. It’s not really possible.

The fact that I got ditched at the library so often turned out to be a good thing because while other kids were at school, I was sitting in a succession of folding chairs in a succession of hallways at every casting call in the greater Los Angeles area for little white girls (or little race-unspecified girls, which also means white), chaperoned by a succession of nannies and girlfriends of my uncle Mitch, two categories that sometimes overlapped. I think the girlfriends sometimes offered to take care of me because they wanted him to see them as maternal, which they thought would make them seem like wife material, but that wasn’t actually a great strategy for keeping the flame alive with ol’ Mitch.

When I was two, my parents’ Cessna, which my dad was flying, crashed into Lake Superior. Or that’s the assumption. No trace was ever found. They were on their way to a romantic getaway at some friend’s middle-of-nowhere backwoods cabin to, as Mitch put it, reconnect. Even when I was little, he told me that my mother wouldn’t quit fucking around. His words. I’m not sure Mitch believed in childhood. “But they wouldn’t quit each other, either,” he’d say. Mitch definitely believed in taglines. He’d started out directing cheesy TV movies with titles like Love Takes a Toll (that was about a toll collector) and Murder for Valentine’s Day (take a wild guess).

My parents had left me with a neighbor in Chicago, but their last will and testament left me to Mitch. There wasn’t really anyone else. No other aunts or uncles, and my grandparents were a combination of dead, estranged, absent, and untrustworthy. Mitch wasn’t a bad guy, but his instincts were of the opportunistic, Hollywoodian variety, so after he’d had me a few months, he called in a favor to get me cast in an applesauce commercial. Then he found my agent, Siobhan, and I got consistent-enough work in commercials and guest spots and TV movies (I played the daughter in Murder for Valentine’s Day) that I can’t remember a time I wasn’t acting or trying to. It seemed like normal life: putting a plastic pony in a plastic stable over and over while cameras rolled and some grown-up stranger told you how to smile.

When I was eleven, after Mitch had stepping-stoned from movies of the week to music videos and was white-knuckle climbing into the indie film world, I got my proverbial big break: the role of Katie McGee in a time-travel cable sitcom for kids called The Big-Time Life of Katie McGee.

On set, my life was squeaky-clean and candy-colored, all puns and tidy plotlines and three-walled rooms under a hot sky of klieg lights. I hammed it up to a braying laugh track while wearing outfits so extravagantly trendy I looked like a manifestation of the tween zeitgeist. When I wasn’t working, I did pretty much whatever I wanted, thanks to my negligent uncle. In her book, Marian Graves wrote: As a child, my brother and I were largely left to our own devices. I believed—and no one told me otherwise for some years—that I was free to do as I liked, that I had the right to go any place I could find my way to. I was probably more of an impetuous little brat than Marian, but I felt the same way. The world was my oyster, and freedom was my mignonette. Life gives you lemons, you carve off their skins and garnish your martinis.

When I was thirteen, after the Katie McGee merch had started selling like crazy and after Mitch had directed Tourniquet and was rolling around in success like a pill-popping pig in shit, he moved us to Beverly Hills on our shared dime. Once I wasn’t stuck out in the Valley anymore, the kid who played Katie McGee’s big brother introduced me to his rich dirtbag high-schooler friends, and they drove me around and took me to parties and got in my pants. Mitch probably didn’t notice how much I was gone because he was usually out, too. Sometimes we’d bump into each other coming home at two or three in the morning, both messed up, and we’d just exchange nods like two people passing in a hotel corridor, attendees at the same rowdy conference.

But here’s a good thing: The on-set tutors for Katie McGee were decent, and they told me I should go to college, and since I liked the sound of that, I weaseled my way into NYU after the show ended, with substantial extra credit for being a B-list TV star. I was already packed and ready to move when Mitch overdosed, and if I hadn’t been, I probably would have just stayed in L.A. and partied myself to death, too.

Here’s something that might have been good or bad: After one semester, I got cast in the first Archangel movie. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if, instead, I’d finished college and stopped acting and been forgotten about, but it’s not like I possibly could have turned down the colossal amount of money that came with playing Katerina. So everything else is irrelevant.

In my blip of higher education, I had time to take Intro to Philosophy and learn about the panopticon, the hypothetical prison Jeremy Bentham came up with, where there would be one itty-bitty guardhouse at the center of a giant ring of cells. One guard was all you needed because he might be watching at any time, and the idea of being watched matters way more than actually being watched. Then Foucault turned the whole thing into a metaphor about how all you need to discipline and dominate a person or a population is to make them think it’s possible they’re being watched. You could tell the professor wanted us all to think the panopticon was scary and awful, but later, after Archangel made me way too famous, I wanted to take Katie McGee’s preposterous time machine back to that lecture hall and ask him to consider the opposite. Like instead of one guard in the middle, you’re in the middle, and thousands, maybe millions, of guards are watching you—or might be—all the time, no matter where you go.

Not that I would have had the nerve to ask a professor anything. At NYU everyone was always staring at me because I’d been Katie McGee, but it felt like they were staring at me because they knew I didn’t deserve to be there. And maybe I didn’t, but you can’t measure fairness in a lab. You can’t know if you deserve something. Probably you don’t. So it was a relief, too, when I quit school for Archangel, to go back to having a million obligations I had no choice about and a daily schedule I didn’t decide for myself. At college I’d flipped through the course catalog, as fat as a dictionary, in complete bafflement. I’d drifted through the cafeteria, looking at all the different foods, at the salad bars and the mountains of bagels and the bins of cereal and the soft-serve machine, and I’d felt like I was being asked to solve some monumental, life-or-death riddle.

After I’d wrecked everything and Sir Hugo Woolsey (the Sir Hugo, who happens to be my neighbor) started talking to me about some biopic he was producing and pulled Marian’s book from his tote bag—a book I hadn’t thought about in fifteen years—suddenly I was in a library again, looking at a slender hardback that might hold all the answers. Answers sounded nice. They sounded like something I wanted, not that I could ever quite unravel what I wanted. Not that I even really knew what wanting meant. I mostly experienced desire as a tangle of impossible, contradictory impulses. I wanted to vanish like Marian; I wanted to be more famous than ever; I wanted to say something important about courage and freedom; I wanted to be courageous and free, but I didn’t know what that meant—I only knew how to pretend to know, which I guess is acting.

Today is my last day of filming for Peregrine. I’m sitting in a mock-up of Marian’s plane that’s hanging from a pulley system and is about to be swung out over a giant tank of water and dropped. I’m wearing a reindeer-fur parka that weighs a thousand pounds and will weigh a million once it gets wet, and I’m trying not to let on that I’m afraid. Bart Olofsson, the director, took me aside earlier, asked if I really wanted to do this stunt myself, given, you know, what happened to my parents. I think I want to confront that, I said. I think I could use the closure. He’d put his hand on my shoulder, done his best guru face. You are a strong woman, he’d said.

Closure doesn’t really exist, though. That’s why we’re always looking for it.

The actor who’s playing Eddie Bloom, my navigator, is also wearing a reindeer-fur parka and has waterproof blood makeup on his forehead because he’s supposed to be knocked out by the impact. In real life, Eddie usually sat at a desk behind Marian’s seat, but the screenwriters, two aggressively cheerful brothers with Hitler Youth haircuts and Hitler Youth faces, thought it would be better if Eddie came up front for the death dive. Sure, fine, whatever.

The story we’re telling isn’t what really happened, anyway. I know that much. But I wouldn’t say I know the truth about Marian Graves. Only she knew.

Eight cameras will record my plunge: six fixed, two operated by divers. The plan is to do it once. Twice, at most. It’s an expensive shot, and our budget was never enormous and has now been exhausted and then some, but when you’ve come this far, the only way out is through. Best-case scenario, it takes all day. Worst-case scenario, I drown, wind up In Memoriam, wind up like my parents except in a fake plane and a fake ocean, not even trying to get anywhere.

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

The stunt coordinator is checking my harness, all business as he digs around my crotch, feeling for the straps and clips among bristly reindeer hair. True to type, he’s got a leathery face, a leathery wardrobe, and a stop-action way of walking from a few imperfect repair jobs.

“Totally,” I say.

When he’s done, the crane lifts us up, swings us out. There’s a scrim at the end of the tank that makes a kind of horizon with the water, and I’m her, Marian Graves, flying over the Southern Ocean with my fuel gauge on empty, and I know I can’t get anywhere other than where I am, which is nowhere. I wonder how cold the water will be, how long before I’m dead. I think through my options. I think about what I’ve promised myself. A gannet plunge.

“Action,” says a voice in my earpiece, and I push on the fake plane’s yoke as though I’m going to fly us down into the center of the earth. The pulleys tip the nose, and we dive.

GREAT CIRCLE By Maggie Shipstead 608 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95. Copyright 2021 © by Maggie Shipstead Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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GREAT CIRCLE

by Maggie Shipstead ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky.

The intertwined journeys of an aviatrix born in 1914 and an actress cast to play her a century later.

In a novel twice as long as and an order of magnitude more complex than the well-received Seating Arrangements (2012) and Astonish Me (2014), Shipstead reveals breathtaking range and skill, expertly juggling a multigenerational historical epic and a scandal-soaked Hollywood satire, with scenes playing out on land, at sea, and in the air. "We were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. She was like me but wasn't. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky": These are the musings of actress Hadley Baxter. She has been familiar with the story of Marian Graves, an aviatrix who disappeared while trying to circumnavigate the globe, since she was just a little girl—before she became a pop-culture phenomenon, turned into a movie star with a mega-franchise, accidentally destroyed her career, and was given the chance to reinvent herself...by playing Marian in a biopic. The film, Peregrine , is based at least partly on the logbook of Marian's "great circle," which was found wrapped in a life preserver on an ice floe near the South Pole. Shipstead's story begins decades earlier, with the christening of the Josephina Eterna in Glasgow in 1909. The unhappy woman who breaks the bottle on her bow, the laconic captain who takes the ship to sea, the woman he beds onboard, the babies that result from this union—Marian Graves and her twin, Jamie—the uncle who has to raise them when their mother drowns and their father disappears: The destinies of every one of these people, and many more unforgettable characters, intersect in ways that reverberate through a hundred years of story. Whether Shipstead is creating scenes in the Prohibition-era American West, in wartime London, or on a Hollywood movie set, her research is as invisible as it should be, allowing a fully immersive experience.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-525-65697-5

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Maggie Shipstead

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SEEN & HEARD

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

PERSPECTIVES

THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 20, 2021

A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.

A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.

Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son  and Black Boy , this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.

Pub Date: April 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Richard Wright

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Great Circle: A novel

This book is a good example of how packaging and promotion can hit or miss with an audience.

Depending on when you hear about a novel, via what medium; and whether you can preview its pages in bookstore browsing or online peek-a-boos, and what customer and professional reviews happen to be posted at that time; plus how the book is physically put together (cover, title, jacket blurb), you can end up with a story you love or one that surprises you the wrong way.

In the case of pre-press Great Circle , here’s the catchline that was available when the title was selected for this review:

“An unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost—Great Circle spans Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles.”

From this it’s easy to infer the story will be about one of the early women pilots who worked hard and sacrificed much to fly, and her adventures covering wide ground. Reasonable to expect action and drama, driven by character.

The balance of the sell blurb:

“After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

“A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates—and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times—collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.”

And from this it’s easy to infer that the story will feature Marian the pilot, with a parallel story about Hadley the actress in another timeline, focusing on how their personalities and destinies intersect, with lots of location color in lots of juicy detail.

Well, you’ll get that in the book, but it’s buried under the juicy details. So many of them, it seems the entire novel is about juicy details, including juicy body parts.

If you could cut the tome by half, you’d find Marian’s and Hadley’s parallel stories clearly defined. Unfortunately, both women’s profiles are so heavily padded by so many other people’s stories it’s hard to keep track of the central characters.

The quantity of those extra stories creates a quality divide between reader tastes and expectations. Depending on which side of the divide you stand, you’ll find either a magnificent literary saga or an extremely disappointing aviation adventure novel.

As a literary saga, Great Circle is woven around all the factors that compel Marian to take her aviation journey in 1950. The narrative opens with an excerpt from her journal of the flight, augmented by a map of the planned circumpolar route.

But before anyone can whisper “airplane,” the narrative switches back in time to the people and forces that led to Marian’s birth, her odd and painful formative years, and her early adulthood—including the backstories of her ancestors, relatives, lovers, spouse, employers, few friends, and assorted secondary characters.

Interspersed among the backstories is the contemporary tale of Hadley, whose life is almost as miserable as Marian’s, albeit at the other end of the financial and public spectrums. It soon becomes apparent that these women share an alienation that forms their connection across time, and one will find an epiphany through the other.

Marian’s introduction to flight comes late and is repeatedly thwarted. About two-thirds of the way through the novel she at last gets airborne and escapes her shackles. She becomes a bush pilot in Alaska, which in turn qualifies her to fly in the women’s ferry service during World War II. The experience makes her capable of flying anything, anywhere, in any conditions. By then she is a bitter loner searching for something she can’t find, with a trail of relationship wreckage in her wake.

Meanwhile, Hadley is playing the lead role in Marian’s story in a film about her life, which was derived from a book written by someone else, which was derived from Marian’s journal of her ill-fated flight.

In both women’s stories, almost every character, scene, and situation is glum, caustic, or tragic. The majority of the characters are victims of emotional abuse, physical abuse—including marital rape—or situational deprivation, and suffer from disillusionment or guilt, often both. As well, there’s more sex in these pages than the average hot romance. Whether solo, hetero, homo, or bi, the encounters are mostly sad and soulless save for a few that give little sparks of hope for love.

Approaching the book from the aviation adventure side, one would expect the story to focus on Marian’s destiny of “circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles”—and to roll right into it, boldly and with purpose. Then the story would flash back to, and/or interweave, the subplots. But the idea of the trip does not come onstage in Marian’s own mind until page 510. She does not take off until page 524, and the journey is over by page 561.

If you add in all the mentions of this trip scattered throughout the book, it comes to loosely 15 percent of the story. Pretty much opposite of what one would expect from an aviation adventure novel.

To summarize: If you relish deep diving into myriad characters, down to their most private mental, emotional, and physical parts; and you love rich evocation of other places and periods; and you have the mental facility and patience to follow nonsequential time jumps across eras—with a little adventure thrown in for spice—then this book will satisfy your taste in spades. It’s a reading experience sure to invigorate book club discussions and maybe win awards.

If, conversely, you’re looking for a trip-around-the-world-in-an-airplane story, heightened by two women spiritually connected through time, and given depth by supporting characters, then you’re opening the wrong book.

What readers on both sides of the divide will find is excellent writing, character plausibility, and a surprise ending. The question is what kind of journey you prefer to take in 600 tightly packed pages.

Carolyn Haley is a broadly experienced writer and editor whose business, DocuMania, provides production support for editors, writers, and designers. She is also the author of three novels forming The Maverick Hearts Collection­- Wild Heart  (equestrian romance),  Cosmic Heart  (paranormal romantic suspense),  Killer Heart  (Vermont mystery)­—and one nonfiction volume,  Open Your Heart with Gardens .

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Great Circle

Maggie shipstead.

608 pages, Hardcover

First published May 4, 2021

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‘Great Circle’ Book Review: Two Narratives, Only One Worth Reading?

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“ Great Circle ” presents a third-person immersion in aviator Marian Graves’ life during Prohibition and World War II times alongside actress Hadley Baxter’s contemporary experiences playing the role of Graves in a movie. The two characters juxtapose awkwardly, with Graves a highly motivated and driven individual and Baxter an aimless, confused person driven by sexual impulse.

Graves’ story transports the reader from her childhood home in Missoula, Montana to Alaska and many other exotic settings around the world. This character-driven story captivates readers with Marian’s struggles to achieve her dream in a time when women had limited opportunities. Author Maggie Shipstead writes riveting, beautifully described and sometimes terrifying flight scenes.

Will readers be engaged enough in Marian’s epic story to plod onward when they are repeatedly jolted out of her narrative by Hadley’s story? Or will Hadley’s story appeal to some readers? Read our review of “Great Circle” to decide if our critique seems justified and whether Shipstead’s novel is deserving of all the fame and praises bestowed on it.

‘Great Circle’ Summary: Back and Forth in Time Between 1914 Feminist Aviation Adventure and 2014 Hollywood

“Great Circle” was short-listed for the 2021 Booker Prize and was a New York Times best seller. Two parallel narratives are maintained throughout the story. Some chapters follow fictional characters Marian Graves and her brother, Jamie, in the 20th century. Other chapters follow fictional actress Hadley Baxter in contemporary times (2014). Hadley plays Marian’s role in the movie, “Peregrine.”

Twin infants Marian and Jamie, rescued from the sinking Josephina Eterna in 1914, are raised by their uncle Wallace. Marian meets stunt aviators Trixie and Felix Brayfogle. They take her on her first flight the same day Charles Lindbergh flies across the Atlantic. Marian becomes obsessed with the dream of becoming an aviator, dropping out of school at age 14 and disguising herself as a man to find work. To forward her interests, she allies herself with, and eventually marries, the wealthy bootlegger, Barclay McQueen.

Hadley Baxter is an aimless actress, bouncing from bed to bed, her behavior imperiling her romantic and professional relationships and career. After being fired from her leading role in the “Archangel” series due to yet another scandal, she accepts an offer to play Marian Graves in the movie, “Peregrine.”

“Great Circle” is historical fiction that embraces the reader like a true story. Readers are brought into intimate relationships with the central characters and fictional characters are woven very skillfully alongside real-life ones. Many readers will experience a sense that Marian and Jamie really existed.

“Great Circle” reminded me of Kristin Hannah’s “ The Nightingale .” Hannah’s novel follows two sisters living in Paris during World War II times.

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‘Great Circle’ Audience and Genre: Appeals to Adventurous Women

“Great Circle” has been classified under the genres of historical fiction, adventure fiction, biographical fiction and women’s fiction. This book will appeal to women of all ages, particularly those who are independent and adventurous. Women with a penchant for aviation and LGBTQ readers will also be drawn to this book. It may appeal more to American and European women than women from other countries.

I found this book to be unique from any other books I have read in recent years. It didn’t strike me as stereotypical in any way.

Independent women would be likely to enjoy “Great Circle” the most. Women who are unconventional thinkers, LGBTQ and/or adventurous are also likely to savor this read. Sexist men, descendants of the Lindbergh family and people offended by graphic sexuality will not appreciate this book.

Perspective: Parallel Stories a Century Apart, One Much Better Than the Other

“Great Circle” is written in third person from multiple points of view during two different time periods. Perspective shifted primarily from Hadley’s in contemporary time (2014) and Marian’s from 1914 until after World War II. The narrative primarily follows Hadley and Marian’s stories. Marian’s narrative sometimes shifts to third person points-of-view of other characters, including Jamie and Caleb.

The alternating point of view enabled the reader to glean information from Hadley’s experiences that never occurs in Marian’s narrative or before the event appears in the narrative. Reverting to Hadley’s point of view might be annoying for some readers, because she has an annoying and shallow personality. She lives in a time where the sky’s the limit in the way of opportunities for women, but she throws it all away, falling into the worn-out role of sex object. The book would have been more engaging without Hadley’s threads.

Three Cs: Compelling, Clear, Concise

Editorial Note: We believe these three factors are important for evaluating general writing quality across every aspect of the book. Before you get into further analysis, here’s a quick breakdown to clarify how we’re using these words:

• Compelling: Does the author consistently write in a way that would make most readers emotionally invested in the book’s content?
• Clear: Are most sentences and parts of the book easy enough to read and understand?
• Concise: Are there sections or many sentences that could be cut? Does the book have pacing problems?

Maggie Shipstead’s writing style is compelling and captivating. Her prose is raw, realistic and engaging. The author incites deep emotional responses and portrays disturbing life events in a vivid and poignant way. She draws readers in tight to the characters until they start to feel like family.

Overall, the author’s writing is sophisticated and well-crafted but easy to follow. “Great Circle” is long — 589 pages — but the pacing works most of the time. The depth of the characters and engaging storyline make it worth the long read.

Some readers will be tempted to rush through chapters that followed Hadley, because of her dislikeable nature. Chapters following Hadley only held my attention when the narrative was about to reveal something intriguing about Marian’s story.

Compelling: Character and Action-Driven Story

Many female readers will connect with Marian on some level. American women today have almost unlimited choices for careers. In her era, Marian was a caged bird fighting frantically for freedom. She quits school and hides her gender as a teen. This ruse allows her to pick up odd jobs (sometimes illegal) to earn money and pursue her dreams to become an aviator.

Marian’s perseverance, drive and passion for flying was not only inspiring, but also delightfully obsessive. Nothing and no one could stand in the way of what she wanted. Fictional characters are smoothly woven in with real people, giving Marian and Jamie real-life dimension.

The rich development of characters, perpetual conflict and tension, and captivating descriptions of flight experiences set the stage for a very compelling read.

Readers will experience a full spectrum of emotions alongside Marian and Jamie. The story is rife with excitement and tension. Both characters display multiple dimensions. Jamie is very different from his twin sister: artistic, hypersensitive, somewhat shy. The emotional ups and downs they experience feel very realistic.

Clear: Professionally Presented

“Great Circle” is very well-written, with beautiful, literary prose. The book is free of typos and is well edited and professional. A YouTube video interview with Shipstead (by Curtis Sittenfeld) revealed that the editing process with Knopf took almost two years. The original text was hundreds of pages longer, Shipstead said.

Following the book’s plot wasn’t overly challenging. The author often uses Hadley’s discoveries to punctuate a chapter with Marian’s experience.

There were no apparent plot holes. Occasionally, there are questions brought up in the narrative that remain unanswered by the end of the book.

Concise: Long Narrative That Could’ve Been Reduced by Cutting Hadley

“Great Circle” would have been more streamlined, coherent and interesting without Hadley’s story. Pacing within chapters was never an issue.

The vocabulary used in the narrative worked. The author wasn’t trying to impress readers with flowery language, and the writing didn’t feel contrived.

‘Great Circle’ Character Development: True-to-Life Characters

Marian and Jamie were brought to life in such depth that I felt like I knew them personally. Following them for decades continues to draw the reader in closer to them. Hadley struck me as shallow. In contrast to Marion, who knew exactly what she wanted, following this character who had no clue what she wanted and saw no worth in herself beyond “sex symbol” felt exhausting and irritating.

There were flashbacks in the story, although not enough to be distracting. Change and impermanence is a consistent theme in the book. Marian and Jamie are constantly traveling throughout most of the book. Their situations shift suddenly and often.

Marian treated others, including the people closest to her, badly throughout the book. Perhaps her pushing others away was emotional self-preservation. She likely feared getting too close to people because she was abandoned as a child. Her tendency to be inconsiderate and selfish never shifted. This static character trait was a slight disappointment, although not surprising because it’s a trait often exhibited by obsessive, hyper-driven types. It was clear that she deeply cared for people but seemed unable to express her feelings.

The author didn’t intrude on the story, but her history added to the dimension and reality of the story. In the Sittenfeld YouTube interview, Shipstead mentioned that her brother was in the Air Force and that he had always been obsessed with flying. Her basic understanding of aviation undoubtedly enabled her to bring raw realism to the flight scenes.

Shipstead also has traveled to many places. She mentioned flying to Greenland and being surrounded by ice and eventually visiting Antarctica. Because the female characters were casual about sex, it crossed my mind that the author might be as well, but that is only conjecture.

Story: Female Empowerment, Aviation, War and Hollywood

“Great Circle” is an engaging, character-driven historical novel. Readers become invested in the lives of Marian and Jamie and are compelled to follow their stories to the end. Older readers who survived World War II will likely find the experiences the characters suffered during this time compelling.

Shipstead’s writing is unique. Marian’s character roughly resembles real-life pilot Amelia Earhart. Both women wanted to circumnavigate the world and cut their hair short and boy-like. Earhart clearly came from a much more privileged background than Graves and didn’t have to frantically fight to become a pilot. The mysterious circumstances of Earhart’s death during her attempted round-the-world flight parallel the oddities experienced during Marian’s attempt.

(spoiler alert) The ending to “Great Circle” should satisfy most readers. Most of the details of Marian Graves’ and Eddie Bloom’s trip around the poles is colorfully revealed through direct experience and through letters Hadley receives from Adelaide Scott.

Prose Style: Fictional Characters Intertwined With Real-Life People

“Great Circle” blends narrative with dialogue and weaves fictional characters skillfully into historical events and meetings with real-life people.

Shipstead writes beautifully and is particularly adept at portraying a sense of bleakness to life and its certain end. She also describes stark settings, which could be interpreted as lonely and desolate or meditative and pristine, depending on the reader’s viewpoint. Below are examples of her writing, which particularly appealed to me.

Hadley’s parents died in a plane crash when she was a child. Her reflections, while swimming in Lake Superior are, “I kept thinking about the sunken Cessna out there somewhere, wondering if infinitesimal particles of my parents were floating around me like fireflies.” These thoughts did strike me as too deep to come from Hadley’s brain, though.

(Spoiler alert) Jamie’s death when his transport ship is hit by torpedoes during the war struck me as the most disturbing scene in the novel. I was saddened to experience the death of this character I’d connected with so deeply and even felt physical pain as I read Shipstead’s description of his life being snuffed out in an agonizing way.

“He survived long enough to feel a sudden crush and violent churn of salt water, the other bodies against his, the pressure that squeezed his lungs, broke his eardrums. Heat billowed past like a wind. He thought he was swimming toward the surface, that the rippling pane of sunlight was almost within reach, that he was about to burst up into the air. And he did see light coming closer, but it was only the blooming glow from the exploding boilers. He didn’t quite feel terror as he died—there wasn’t enough time. Nor did he feel anything resembling acceptance, nothing like peace. He didn’t think of Marian or Sarah or Caleb, or of his paintings or Missoula, though he might have, if he’d lived a few more seconds.”

During the circumnavigation attempt, Marian and Eddie are trying to land their plane in Antarctica in terrible weather.

“Sky and ice blend into a seamless shell, can’t be prised apart. Like flying in a bowl of milk, pilots say. The horizon is gone. There is empty space around her, above and below, but she has no means of judging how much. The altimeter says they are at eleven thousand feet, but that’s above sea level. She doesn’t know how thick the ice is. They might be only a thousand feet above it. She can see nothing beyond a vague swirl of blowing snow.”

Sentences were written in a way that kept me engaged in “Great Circle.” I wasn’t thrown out of the story by any apparent repetitive sentence structure.

Parallel plot, metaphor, and simile are literary devices employed in this book. The parallel plot presents Marian Graves in historical times and actress Hadley Baxter in contemporary times. There are vague similarities between the two female characters. Hadley and Marian both grew up living with uncles who neglected them. If Hadley had been interesting, this parallel story technique might have worked for me. Hadley’s story felt burdensome to read.

Metaphor and simile were used often to great effect. Imagery was also used to make descriptions more colorful.

I assumed from reading this book that the author is highly sexual and enjoys adventure travel. I perceive that she questions the circle of life and wonders whether it ends in oblivion or something more ethereal.

Dialogue: Realistic and Unique to Each Character

The “Great Circle” dialogue suited each character and blended well with description and narrative. It felt realistic and organic.

The amount of dialogue in the book felt balanced. Marian doesn’t speak extraneously. When she says more than a few words, the scenes tend to be emotionally charged, every word ringing with significance. When she speaks with only a word or two, she sometimes seems like she’s distracted and thinking ahead. Written letters serve as another form of “dialogue” in the work.

Internal and spoken dialogue help readers understand Marian’s conflicted emotions toward Barclay and her deep feelings for Jamie, Caleb and Ruth, despite her often-aloof actions. Dialogue illuminates Jamie’s sensitivity and attachment to Sarah, Caleb and Marian during sections that follow him.

Dialogue was easy to follow when Marian’s story was presented. Following Hadley’s conversations was more difficult.

‘Great Circle’ Setting: From the Pacific Northwest to Antarctica

Numerous worldwide settings are portrayed in this book. Marian and Jamie grow up during the Prohibition era in Missoula, Montana. From the 1920s to 1950s, readers follow the siblings (often not in the same place at the same time) to the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Pacific islands, London, Antarctica and New Zealand. The setting for Hadley’s part of the story is primarily Los Angeles during contemporary times.

The reader travels often, particularly when Marian and Jamie are serving in World War II. I haven’t read a book that transported me to so many unusual and less-traveled locations since Nicholas Christopher’s “ A Trip to the Stars .”

Settings are described in various levels of detail, depending on how essential they are to the story. The author immerses readers in vivid descriptions of Montana, Alaska, Antarctica and New Zealand. The author’s descriptions of Antarctica bring to life the chill and desolation of the landscape and the experience of being there. Shipstead’s descriptions of places always brought me right onto the scene.

Rhetoric: Many Themes, Take Your Pick

I can’t tell if the author is trying to make a statement by writing this book. The characters all had a voice, but the author didn’t seem to intrude on their development.

Themes of alcoholism, parenting (or lack of it), class difference, societal roles and expectations, feminism and sexuality are explored in “Great Circle.” In a YouTube interview, Shipstead mentioned that she was exploring the theme of scale when she wrote the book.

The narrative makes it clear she’s very knowledgeable and well-traveled and has done extensive research. I never felt that her personality or her views intruded on the story.

Cultural and Political Significance: A Woman Ahead of Her Time

“Great Circle” focuses on the Prohibition and World War II eras. I wasn’t born until the 1960s, but the portrayal of these times felt authentic and aligned with other well-written historical novels I’ve read.

This book is likely to resonate with individuals who believe women have the right to pursue any dream or career they want. Morally conservative or religious individuals might find the sexual behavior of the characters offensive.

The darker sides of the Lindbergh family, including Charles’ alliances with the Nazis, were new reading to me.

Critiquing the Critics: Are They Right About Hadley and the Length of the Book?

The New York Times described “Great Circle” as “an action-packed book rich with character, but it’s at the level of the sentence and the scene, the small but unforgettable salient detail, that books finally succeed or fail. In that, ‘Great Circle’ is consistently, often breathtakingly, sound.”

The Washington Post described it as “Relentlessly exciting…So convincingly does Shipstead stitch her fictional heroine into the daring flight paths of early aviators that you’ll be convinced that you remember the tragic day her plane disappeared.”

Favorable reviews on Amazon consistently praised the beautiful writing, the deep development of characters and the buffet of interesting settings portrayed in the work. Critical reviews often disparaged the graphic sex scenes in the book, the presence of Hadley’s story and the length of the novel. Hadley was repeatedly described as “vapid” and “shallow.”

I concur with all the favorable points made by reviewers and, of course, am equally frustrated with Hadley’s character. Some of the reviewers that described the book as too long or boring struck me as readers who don’t normally read books with much depth.

Book Aesthetic: Somewhat Artistic for Historical Fiction Novel

The “Great Circle” cover is quite unique and artistic, with a biplane (with a trail behind it that shows its recent path), several orange suns, spheres, or circles of life of different sizes and surrounding billowy clouds. The circles may symbolize the lives of the central characters.

The plane on the cover suggests the book is about aviation. The watercolor nature of the sky is vaguely ethereal. “New York Times best seller” and “Booker Prize Finalist” are printed at the top of the front cover. There is a quote about the book on the bottom of the front cover and several “Praise for ‘Great Circle’” quotes on the back cover. The text on the cover is intended to persuade potential readers to purchase and the artwork portrays a sense of mystery that lures readers to explore further.

The cover is more artistic than most historical or women’s fiction covers I’ve seen. It seems very fitting for the story’s aviation and life-path themes.

‘Great Circle’ Review: Book vs. Film

“Great Circle” is slated to be made into a TV series , but it hasn’t yet been released. Once it’s released, we’ll update this section.

Reviewer’s Personal Opinion: Hadley, the Marian Imposter

I loved Shipstead’s beautiful, literary writing, the colorful and multisensory descriptions of so many exotic places, the flight experiences, Marian’s independence, and Jamie’s creativity and sensitivity.

Hadley irritated me. She seemed blind to the fact that she was a talented actress with unlimited opportunities in front of her. She allowed her impulses to control her, which brought peril to her reputation and career. Her only goal in life seemed to be to bed men. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. I was so annoyed whenever I was thrown into another chapter about her.

I knew I hated her when this thought went through her mind when she was meeting with a 40-something woman: “In 20 years, she would be a skin balloon with eyes.”

It wasn’t apparent she learned anything during the arc of the story. It frustrated me that unworthy Hadley was playing the role of Marian in the movie, “Peregrine” and that her story would be inaccurate and distorted.

Jamie was my favorite character. (Spoiler alert) I connected to him as an artist and ally with many of his sensitivities. He loved people deeply and openly expressed that he cared. His basic good character never changed, even though he felt that it did because he killed people in the war to protect himself or others.

“Great Circle” reminded me of Kristin Hannah’s “ The Nightingale .” Hannah’s novel follows two sisters living in Paris during World War II times. Hannah’s writing also brings readers close to the characters, and her story is equally intense and sometimes heartbreaking.

I have never met Maggie Shipstead or communicated with her. When I was nearly finished writing this review, I listened to a video on YouTube where Curtis Sittenfeld interviewed her .

My daughter loaned me her copy of “Great Circle.” She has a way of finding books I enjoy. I wanted to review this book because I read dozens of books a month and rarely come across a gem like this one.

‘Great Circle’ Review: One of Those Books I’ll Read Again and Again

“Great Circle” is one of the best books I’ve read in recent months. It’s one of those books I will read again and again. I loved the writing, the colorful descriptions and most of all, the main characters. The parallel narrative didn’t work for me. For that reason, I deducted .5 stars. “Great Circle” would have been a more compelling and streamlined read without the introduction of Hadley’s character.

‘Great Circle’ FAQs

Is ‘great circle’ lgbtq.

Yes, “Great Circle” includes LGBTQ themes as characters explore a wide range of sexual identities and relationships throughout the story.

Is the book ‘Great Circle’ based on a true story?

“Great Circle” is not based on a true story, but it is inspired by historical events and figures in aviation. The author takes artistic liberties while mixing fact and fiction to craft a compelling and inspiring tale.

Buying and Rental Options

Below are links to places where “Great Circle” can be purchased:

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E-Commerce Text and Audio Purchases

Physical location purchase and rental options.

“Great Circle” is available at most Barnes and Noble and most independent bookstores.

Digital Rental Options

“Great Circle” is available as an ebook and audiobook through many libraries through the Libby app. Readers may have to wait up to 26 weeks to get the ebook book and up to 6 weeks to get the audiobook . There are 20 ebook copies and 20 audiobook copies available through the Libby app through the Pima County Public Library in Tucson, Arizona.

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The True Story Behind Maggie Shipstead’s ‘Great Circle’

The bestselling author’s latest novel was informed by years of researching the history of female aviation and traveling to far-flung places

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Often when we talk about a big, ambitious book, we reach for the language of geography. We describe the terrain it covers; we say that it sprawls, or ranges widely. The book is framed as a kind of passage through the world: we might talk about a protagonist’s journey, or an author’s exploration of a topic.

In award-winning author Maggie Shipstead’s new novel, all of those analogies are made literal. 

Great Circle ’s 600 pages span a full century and the entire planet. The book tells the story of Marian Graves, a fictional female pilot who disappeared in 1950 while attempting an unprecedented north-south circumnavigation of the earth. She had only one leg left in her trip, a final leap from Antarctica to New Zealand , when she vanished, Earhart-style, in the South Pacific. Shipstead takes readers through the events of Marian’s life leading up to that moment, from her parents’ doomed marriage and her unorthodox childhood, roaming semi-feral with her twin brother in the Montana woods, to the complex web of desires, ambitions, and romantic entanglements that prompt her to her final flight. 

Braided with Marian’s story is a contemporary narrative. Hadley Baxter, a troubled young Hollywood starlet, attempts to rebound from scandal by playing Marian in an Oscar-bait biopic. But Marian and Hadley have more in common than a casting decision: Hadley’s own parents crashed into Lake Superior in a small plane when she was a toddler, and like Marian, she was raised, to the extent that she was raised at all, by a dissolute uncle. Her parents’ fate matches what’s known of her character’s final act, and while Marian yearns for the sky, the specter of what she calls the “sharp gannet plunge” of lives being extinguished in cold, dark water looms throughout both timelines.

Great Circle is a big novel but not a daunting one: an impressive array of historical research is integrated seamlessly, and the story is propulsive. The characters are compelling, and their choices, even the extraordinary ones, make sense within their worlds. Shipstead’s sentences are luminous, her metaphors precise: a luxury steamship crossing the North Atlantic at night is “a jeweled brooch on black satin”; in the present day, Hadley looks down from a hillside mansion at “the big flat circuit board of Los Angeles planing off into the pale haze.” Anyone who’s felt a little plane rattle up off a rough dirt runway will recognize their experience in Marian’s; anyone who hasn’t will get a taste of the sensation.

Those details were earned through deep research, trips to the archives, and Shipstead’s own experiences. She grew up in Orange County, California, and is now based in Los Angeles, where many of her friends work, in one way or another, in the film industry. She has written two previous and very well-regarded novels: Seating Arrangements , an award-winning New York Times bestseller, and Astonish Me . She was traveling between her first and second release, figuring out what to work on next, when she got the idea for Great Circle . 

Shipstead was in Auckland, New Zealand, and spotted a statue of Jean Batten , the first pilot to fly solo from England to New Zealand, outside the city’s main airport terminal. Batten was one of a cohort of female pilots who were enormously famous in the early, daring years of aviation but who have since largely slipped from mainstream public memory. The exception, Amelia Earhart, is known more for her disappearance than her accomplishments. The rich history of female aviation, and how little of it we choose to remember, got Shipstead chewing on narrative ideas that involve disappearance and death. “It’s so often the same thing,” she says, “but as a society we process it really differently.”

Shipstead let the idea linger for a couple of years before really sitting down to write in the fall of 2014. Around that time, she also began to get assignments to write travel stories for various glossy magazines ( including Outside ), and a fruitful cross-fertilization began. Over several years, her reporting took her to the far-flung islands of the Pacific—Hawaii, the Cook Islands, sub-Antarctic New Zealand—and around the circumpolar region, from Greenland and Alaska to Svalbard, in Arctic Norway, and the Canadian high Arctic. The map of Marian’s journey began to take shape. 

The trickiest and most critical place to reach was Antarctica. The southern continent was crucial to the story of Marian’s disappearance, and Shipstead says she didn’t think she could imagine her way through it. Landing on the Greenland ice sheet in a C-130 for a travel story would give her some sense of the flat, frozen immensity at the poles, but she wanted more. The gap in her research was resolved unexpectedly: on an assignment to the sub-Antarctic, she met an expedition leader who worked in the region and they hit it off. He invited her along on a cruise, and so, she says, “our first date, really, was a five-week-long sea voyage to Antarctic. That was a really strange way of getting that wish granted.”

The rich history of female aviation, and how little of it we choose to remember, got Shipstead chewing on narrative ideas that involve disappearance and death.

There were other lucky breaks. During a visit to an aviation museum in Missoula, Montana, Marian’s hometown, Shipstead was hanging around, sitting in the cockpit of a vintage airplane on display, when she was invited along by a couple of pilots who were taking a 1927 Travel Air 6000 up for a spin. “That became the plane that Marian learned to fly, because I’d been in it, I’d been in the actual aircraft, in the exact right place,” she says. “That was really serendipitous and incredibly useful.”

Shipstead’s travels were supplemented by wide-ranging research into the times and places that Marian and her brother, Jamie,   pass through. The early history of aviation is woven into the fabric of the novel, but so is the story of Prohibition-era Montana, of bootleggers and cross-border flights to Canada. When World War II breaks out in Europe in 1939, the novel absorbs and makes use of several little-known pockets of history: the “combat artists” who painted and drew the front lines for the United States military; the crew of female pilots in England who flew warplanes around from base to base before their next missions across the channel; the bloody battles in remote corners of the world, like the Aleutian Islands. “Once I came across it, in it went,” she says.

Shipstead’s brother, a former pilot and Air Force veteran who, like Marian, had grown up intoxicated by airplanes, helped with the technical details, like what models of planes Marian might have flown and how far she could have gone on a tank of fuel. Shipstead wanted Marian’s circumnavigation plan to have been just barely within the realm of feasibility at the time she made the attempt—nearly impossible but not completely out of reach. That largely determined the timing of the flight in the novel, which matched up with a real-life Antarctic expedition that could have offered Marian a refuelling station, and with the existence of several new postwar runways in the South Pacific. Shipstead knows she may not satisfy every detail-loving aviation buff out there, but, she says, “I tried to keep it all tethered to reality as much as possible.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in Cessnas and Twin Otters, taking off from or landing on ice and ocean and earth, so I felt very at home in Marian’s world. At first, Hadley’s share of Great Circle felt like an interruption to me. But as the novel unspooled, I appreciated her perspective more and more. A lifetime after Marian’s disappearance, the filmmakers try to reconstruct her, but to a reader, it’s clear that the gap between her life and their story is a yawning crevasse. The contemporary timeline shows us how much is lost when a person dies or disappears and how much becomes unknowable, no matter how much historical research we might dig up. 

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Review: Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

“Marian can imagine the plume of herself riding the westerly wind over the Southern Ocean, the bits of teeth and bone sinking at once, a gritty gray film settling on the surface until the chop mixes her in. But she doesn't know what will happen to the part of her that is not her body. All the times he has brushed against death, she’s never given much thought to what might come after. Now she considers it. She supposes there will be nothing. She supposes each of us destroys the world. We close our eyes and snuff out all that has existed, all that will ever be."

“The dog jumped up onto his bed, circled, and settled. Everything in the shape of the animal commanded love: her long soft ears, the black hairs mingled with the rad on her flanks, the way she slung the tip of her tail cozily over her nose. He could not make peace with the magnitude of suffering in the world. It registered in him as a wave of heat and tingling, an acceleration in his heart and a lightness in his head–a sensation both puny and unbearable. The only way to live was to shut it out, but even when he turned his thoughts away, he was still aware of it, as one who lives alongside a levee is aware of the deluge waiting on the other side.”

“He struggled to write anything meaningful at all to Marian. What could he tell her? That the war had crushed and smoothed him into a different substance entirely, something hard and flat? Apparently he was a person who could watch men drown and feel no pity. He’d been present for every minute, every second of his own life, and he hadn’t known himself. He’d thought he could paint the war and not belong to the war. He’d fancied himself an observer, but there was no such thing here."

“It isn’t how I thought it would be, now that the circle is almost closed, the beginning and the end held apart by one last fearsome piece of water. I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. I thought I would believe I’d completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed. I thought I would not be afraid. I thought I would become more than I am, but now I know I am less than I thought.”

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BookBrowse Reviews Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

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Great Circle

• BookBrowse Review:
• Critics' Consensus ( 7 ) :
• Readers' Rating ( 3 ):
• First Published:
• May 4, 2021, 608 pages
• Apr 2022, 672 pages

• Historical Fiction
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Strong Women
• Top 20 Best Books of 2021
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• Buy This Book Amazon Bookshop.org

About This Book

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This stellar historical novel explores the lives of a groundbreaking aviatrix in the first half of the 20th century and the actress slated to play her a century later.

Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle follows the lives of two fictional women: Prohibition-era aviatrix Marian Graves and contemporary actress Hadley Baxter, who lands the role of Marian in an upcoming movie. When approached about the film, Hadley has just blown up her life by creating a scandal she knew would likely get her ousted from the franchise that made her career. Feeling a certain kinship with Marian (both were orphaned as infants and raised by dissolute uncles), she accepts the role, dreaming of Oscar glory for her participation in her first "serious" film. Alternating with Hadley's first-person account is the third-person narration of Marian's life, from the circumstances surrounding her birth to her fate decades later. The bulk of the story is Marian's, and Shipstead fleshes out her life in such believable detail I found it hard to remember the character wasn't a real person. Although Marian's passion for flying underlies every part of her narrative, the book is less about her exploits as a pilot and the lengths she goes to achieve her aims and more about her journey of self-discovery. The author brilliantly illustrates the many factors in Marian's life that mold her into the person she becomes by her last flight. We develop an in-depth understanding of this remarkable character and are loath to let her go. Hadley's chapters are briefer, and although they cover a shorter time period, her journey feels just as real as Marian's. She's pretty obnoxious at first, a stereotypical entitled Hollywood starlet, but as she becomes more involved with the film and the people behind its production, she develops a complexity that ultimately makes her more sympathetic. As with Marian, the author creates a multifaceted character in Hadley, one who feels real to the reader. Shipstead's writing is gorgeous from start to finish, whether she's describing the countryside ("October leans into November. The trees are topped with gold, the cottonwoods bright as apricot flesh. The landscape flares and shimmers"); Marion's observations ("With the right instruments, you have a fighting chance of leveling out even if the cloud goes all the way down and brushes the earth like the marabou hem of a diaphanous white robe worn by God"); or Hadley's perceptions ("[S]he just sat there and stared like she was trying to turn me to stone with her mind. Or maybe she couldn't move her face. She's starting to have work done. In twenty years she'll be a skin balloon with eyeholes"). There's just enough of this lush writing to entertain, but not so much that it bogs down the narrative. Also interspersed are bits of aviation history as they occurred during Marion's timeline. For example, the author inserts a couple of paragraphs about Charles Lindbergh's historic transatlantic flight in 1927 that occurs just as 13-year-old Marion is becoming acquainted with a pair of barnstormers who take her on her first flights. I occasionally find dual timelines confusing or annoying (sometimes the characters are too similar, sometimes the jump between them happens too frequently, sometimes I feel one or more storyline could have been jettisoned, etc.). Such was not the case with Great Circle . Switches between the two stories are so expertly crafted I'm hard-pressed to name a novel that accomplishes this feat more skillfully. At around 600 pages, the book is also quite long; however, I never felt like it was a slog. I'll sometimes come across a doorstopper and think about how it could have been edited into a more manageable length, but not this time; there's not a single sentence I'd have wanted left out. Although I wouldn't call it a page-turner, its pacing is excellent and it kept me engaged, start to finish. Great Circle is one of my favorites of the year so far, and I'd unhesitatingly suggest it to anyone looking for an exquisite, character-driven work of literature.

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Beyond the Book:    Elinor Smith

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About This book

More by this author

From the bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway , A Gentleman in Moscow , and Rules of Civility , a richly detailed and sharply drawn collection of stories, including a novella featuring one of his most beloved characters

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by Maggie Shipstead

Published 2023

From the Booker Prize nominee and New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle , a piercing, irresistible first collection of short stories exquisite in their craft and audacious in their range.

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