Jamie is the softer of the two, a burgeoning illustrator with an “almost debilitating horror of animal suffering.”ĭuring one aimless fall morning in 1927, when Marian is 12, riding bareback on a horse named Fidler, she catches sight of a red-and-black biplane, “abrupt and magnificent as an announcing angel, passing so low it seemed she could have touched the wheels.”įrom that moment on, she is besotted with planes and the certitude that it is her destiny to fly them. Marian is the intrepid one, fearless and inquisitive about the outside world, a rascally, guileless adventure-seeker. “If it is a splendidly sunny day or an enticingly snowy one, they might wander away somewhere else.” “They do not always go to school,” Shipstead writes. Their uncle paints and drinks and the children are left to raise themselves in a wilderness paradise, oblivious to the refinements of the modern world. Marian and her twin brother, Jamie, are sent to live with their alcoholic uncle in Missoula, Mont., after their father is committed to Sing Sing after his ship sank with their mother, but without him. It’s a rousing story, well-crafted and paced, about female ambition addiction, guilt, aviation history and, oh yes, vegetarianism. Shipstead, the author of “Seating Arrangements,” attempts to tell parallel stories of two women, one neglected but ambitious, the other, indulged but flailing, over time. It is also the story of a modern actress beloved for her role in a fan-fiction movie series, who is slated to play Marian, around whom “Great Circle” ultimately turns. “Great Circle” is the epic story of the female twin Marian and her determination to escape convention and pilot her own plane, ultimately circumnavigating the globe. The instinctive decision he makes as the ship sinks – to save his infant twins – will forever damn him as a coward, an ignobility that eventually eats him alive. Addison will fall again – this time into the sea as his ship, the Josephina Eterna, suffers an explosion and is soon consumed in flames. In Maggie Shipstead’s sweeping “Great Circle,” the reader first meets Addison when he is falling for the seductive, unstable daughter of a shipping tycoon. It is 1914 and a scrappy, taciturn ship captain, Addison Graves, is on an ocean liner, falling. Author Maggie Shipstead (Los Angeles Times)

Great circle review