When Marian becomes an adolescent, Wallace tells Jamie that he’s worried she might end up “tough and alone, with a cigar stuck in her face…I already have trouble picturing her in a dress. She and her twin brother, Jamie, are raised by their dissolute but kindly Uncle Wallace after a disaster at sea takes away their parents.

Marian’s unique personality matches her unusual upbringing. But the life of a female pilot in the early 20th century isn’t easy: She must combat strong familial and societal pressure in order to do what she loves. From the moment she sees a biplane for the first time as a child, becoming a pilot is her all-consuming passion. Marian is such a well-drawn, compelling character that the reader may be excused for believing she really existed. Shipstead is willing to risk losing the reader from the outset, mimicking in narrative form the daring flying maneuvers Marian loves to perform.īut this novel richly rewards the reader willing to follow where it leads, and it soon becomes clear that the alternating omniscient and third-person-limited narration also mimics in narrative form the central theme of circular movement.

The opening pages make for a vertiginous reading experience because of the many characters, settings, and time periods introduced in quick succession. Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle is a beautifully written, sprawling epic of a book about Marian Graves, a fictional female aviator who disappears in 1950 on the final leg of an attempted north-south circumnavigation of the earth.

The great circle book review