Great Circle

As a reader I am inspired by stories that set my imagination afire, bring chills to my spine, tears to my eyes, and comfort in this baffling world. Great Circle is that kind of novel.

As a genealogist, I am fascinated by the hidden stories of my ancestors. I can never learn enough to fully flesh out the details of their lives. What it was like to leave their homes and reinvent themselves in a new land? What lead to the seduction that left them unmarried mothers? How did they face the devastation of a child drowning in the canal they had to pass every day? I only know that they survived, for a while, and then they died, taking their secrets with them. As someday, I will, too.

Life throws us into despair--all of us. We give in and give up, show more or we resist and struggle to the surface of the water, take another breath, and reinvent our life in the after-world. Sometimes there is freedom in reinvention. Sometimes it saves us.

Great Circle is one of those massive reads that sweep us across time and history, a long journey into character's entire lives. They are orphaned or neglected and unprotected by unreliable adults, and make their way as best they can. They lose loves and are loved by monsters. Dreams are fragile and come with a cost. Again and again, they must reinvent a life with a new name or in a new place or with a new love or the end of a love.

First, there is the story of orphans Marian Graves and her brother Jamie who run wild with neighbor boy Caleb, their adult caretakers unreliable. When barnstormers pass through, Marian becomes obsessed with the idea of flying. Caleb cuts her hair so she can pass as a boy to earn money towards flying lessons by secret moonshine deliveries.

Barclay was a criminal, and he was rich, and he was used to getting what he wanted. And he wanted Marian from the first time he saw her as a girl. She entered into a dreadful bargain: he would pay for her flying lessons, and she understood the unspoken agreement that someday she would be his.

Trapped into an abusive and controlling marriage, Marian escapes, disappears into Alaska, reinventing herself as a bush pilot. When WWII broke out, she volunteers for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying warplanes. She meets Ruth, who becomes her great love, and Ruth's gay husband Eddie. But it is Caleb she still turns to when broken.

After the war with its many losses, Marian is offered financing to fund her dream of flying around the world, pole to pole, she only trusts Eddie to be her navigator. After Antarctica, they are believed to have been lost at sea.

Then there is Hadley, also an orphan and abused by her uncle, who became a beloved child actress, and has a breakdown at age 20. Now, she has a change to reinvent herself in a movie about Marian's life, based on the journal Marian left behind at Antarctica before she disappeared.

Hadley goes on a quest to learn about Marian, discovering the truth of what happened on that great circle trip from pole to pole.

Marian's story gives Hadley a sense of freedom and control. And, and it can free us, too, showing us how to live with courage even in the darkest of times. How we must know what we want, and to always work for our dreams.

This past year has been a horror show of death and fear of death, political clashes and unimaginable chaos, outbreaks of hate and violence. We know full well the disappointments and pain of this world.

A story can help us to heal. To know we are not alone, that there is a way to get through the hell and live into a moment of joy and moments of grace that can be enough to live on. This is the gift of literature.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. show less

I would be pressing this into everyone's hands if it weren't so damn long. So enjoyable, from the seafaring to the feral childhoods to the Kristen Stewart-style self-destructive starlet sections. I don't doubt that in years to come I'll still think of Marian Graves as a pioneering pilot, even though she's not real.

I expected to like this book more than I actually did. I am obviously in the minority because it has a solid 4 star rating across LibraryThing and 4.1 on Goodreads. There are also rave reviews from The Guardian and others. And, it was shortlisted for both The Booker in 2021 and the Women's Prize in 2022. One of the rave reviews was from someone who listened to the audiobook so I can't even blame it on the choice of medium. My biggest problem was that there were two timelines and two protagonists and when the book switched from one to the other I kept feeling like I had missed something in the previous segment. Turns out, I hadn't; the author just decided to refer to events that hadn't been covered previously as if we all knew what show more happened. Then, the salient details would come out later in the segment. I felt like I was floundering in the rough sea of text, much like the one protagonist ends up doing.

The title refers to the flight the fictitious female pilot, Marian Graves, took around the world from the North Pole to the South Pole. Marian and her twin brother, Jamie, were raised by their uncle in Montana. He was an artist and an alcoholic and wasn't much of a supervisor of the children. Jamie inherited the artistic genes and was a gentle soul. Marian was much more of a daredevil. When she saw a husband and wife team of aviators at the local airport she decided to become a pilot. She earned money for her flying lessons by delivering bootleg liquor which brought her to the attention of the local rumrunner. He financed her purchase of a plane and, when her uncle needed help, he convinced Marian to marry him. Marian was no shy virgin as she had been going to bed with neighbour Caleb for years. When World War II came along (and the US joined the fight) all three of these young people signed up. Jamie became a war artist, Caleb was a soldier (perhaps with intelligence), and Marian (who as a woman couldn't join the Air force) flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary. Marian and Caleb were stationed in England, Jamie was with the Pacific Ocean fleet. In England Marian had a love affair with another female pilot but goes back to Caleb when Jamie is killed. Her lover dies in a plane crash soon after. Her lover was married to a flight navigator in a marriage of convenience to hide that fact that both were gay. When Marian decides to attempt the Great Circle she asks him to be her navigator. In the second timeline, which takes place in Hollywood in 2014, we meet Hadley Baxter, an actress who has recently been let go from a film series. She is offered the part of Marian in a film called Peregrine. By this means we learn the final outcome of Marian who disappeared between Antartica and New Zealand on her Great Circle flight. There are some parallels between Marian and Hadley in that both were raised by their uncles after losing their parents but Hadley is a much less compelling character than Marian.

This is a long book and long audiobook and there are a lot of characters. Maybe the print book had a cast of characters but listening to the audiobook, especially when we jumped timelines, made it difficult to keep track of some of the minor characters. show less

"Our flight is in defiance of the sun and its daily traverse. Come west, the sun says. It tugs at us, runs off like a child trying to entice us to follow. But we must go north, leaving the light behind."
---Marian Graves

If you love a big book you can sink into and seldom come up for air; a book that makes you start rationing your reading time because you just don't want it to end; historical fiction that includes real historical figures by a writer that appears to be at the top of her game...well, this just might be the book for you.

The fictional protagonist, Marian Graves, born in 1914 and shipwrecked as an infant along with her twin brother Jamie, longs to fly from her earliest days. Set in Missoula, Montana, Marian and Jamie are show more living with their uncle, an artist and alcoholic who seldom knows their whereabouts or what they're up to. She gets her start flying across the border into Canada, during Prohibition, for the local bootlegger. But like everything in the lives of women, it comes at a price and she soon finds that the mysterious and handsome man who can give her what she wants most, her own plane to fly, is also her worst enemy.

A century later, Hadley Baxter, a scandal-ridden Hollywood starlet, is picked to play Marian in the biopic of her life. It would seem that the two have little in common, but Hadley also lost her parents not at sea, but in a plane crash, and like Marian was brought up by a wayward uncle, a Hollywood producer, strung out on drugs. And Hadley suffers from some of the same barriers that Marian faced seventy years ago just brought up to date by social media.These two threads continue throughout the book and although I thought Marians story was more compelling the author managed to make the connections between the two characters work as the novel progressed.

The research that went into the novel was extensive as Shipstead combined the intertwining stories of the early female aviatrixes and came up with the idea that Marian would at some point in her life attempt to complete a longitudinal great circle around the planet, that would end tragically. But even at that, the author keeps you guessing.

This is a big, big book in so many ways. You might think 615 pages is too long but Shipstead needed every one of those pages to cover not only Marian's remarkable story, but the history that took place during that time. Not a word is wasted as we travel through Prohibition and the Depression, WWII POW camps and the women pilots gathered by (real life) Jackie Cochran, who were used to transfer planes from one location to another but never to fly planes in battle because, well, just because. It just wasn't done. The male pilots wouldn't like it. And finally the post-WWII years when Marian attempts her last flight. In the meantime, Shipstead covers gender identity, the use of artists to portray military life and battles, barn stormers in the early 20th century and more in order to to create a richly expansive story.

So real was Marian's character that at some point in the book I had to google her because I was sure she was a real character. All the characterizations are deep and rich and lively and felt so real to me they nearly jumped off the page. Top-notch historical fiction. show less

Anyone who reads a lot of my reviews will notice that as a general rule my 5-star reviews are often short. This will be no exception. The book is glorious. I can't see it being beaten for best of 2021. Shipstead takes on the old-fashioned epic novel, respects its boundaries, and still utterly recasts the form. It is masterful, and also just a freaking great story filled with fascinating characters that are so fully drawn it often feels as if they are sitting beside you watching you read.

I don't think there is a question that Marian is the star of this story, but she is a secure enough character to cede a whole lot of time to a whole lot of characters. This generosity extends to characters in a dual and current timeline shared in first show more person by its leading lady, Hadley Baxter. Hadley is a young actress playing a significantly fictionalized version of Marian in a film. And Marian should be secure because no one, no matter how fully drawn, overshadows her. Not the violent abusive gangster Brady, the rugged nearly feral Caleb, the sensitive longing Jamie, the good and kind and brave and doomed characters that pop up all along the way. Marian is our north star, and we never forget it. I imagine Marian also relates to Hadley who is, 70 years later, also limited by the fact of being a woman. Both are held back by society's fear of being weakened by allure, a fear so strong that men and women turn venereration into a cage and reduce the alluring woman and her lagacy to the sum of her (actual and purported) romantic attachments.

Is the book too ambitious in its sweep? Maybe? But Shipstead makes it al work and the 600+ pages flew by. In fact I stopped about 30 pages before the final page (where Marian's story completes and Hadley's is just about to do so) and started reading something else because I did not want it to end.

One note: I got this in audio and ebook, and really enjoyed both. I got sick in the middle, and was light sensitive so listening worked best for a lot of this, and the reader is really great. When I was able to read though, I went for the text because the writing, at the sentence level, is astonishingly great, and I wanted to roll around and cover myself in that prose over and over again. show less

As many reviewers have said this book is a bit too long and the modern day narrative thread doesn't entirely feel necessary. Some of the plot resolutions don't really feel quite earned.

But the core story of Marion is interesting and compelling, and covers a lot of ground about female pilots and their role in wartime and before. Marian is fictional but a lot of the surrounding detail is historical. I liked learning about early flight and planes and Marian herself is a great character.

This big, sprawling novel, begins on a doomed ocean-liner in 1914 and ends in both Antarctica and New Zealand, sometime in the 1950s. It mainly focuses on Marian Graves and her twin brother Jamie, raised by their bachelor uncle in rural Montana. Marian has an early fascination with flight and begins taking lessons as a teenager. She soon becomes an ace pilot, running bootleg liquor. This is just the tiny tip of the iceberg of this story, as it also follows her through WWII, as a member of a female flying brigade and her life beyond, including friendships, romances and lots of adventure. This is a beefy read, but Shipstead is a fine writer and a gifted storyteller, so it pulls the reader along. Her research skills are immense too, which show more I found impressive. This was my first book by her and now I want to read her earlier work. show less