A novel that switches between two different periods and tones confronts the essential challenge of rendering both competing story lines engaging, and Great Circle struggles to make that case. It’s also a culturally rich story that takes full advantage of its extended length to explore the changing landscape of the 20th century. a relentlessly exciting story about a woman maneuvering her way between tradition and prejudice to get what she wants. Although we’ll never see some of these people again, the author’s careful investment in them sets down a thicket of secrets and obligations that will play out over the coming decades. Shipstead creates this catastrophe in all its watery terror, but what’s even more impressive is the way she sets up these characters so that we feel the full weight of the fears and passions pulling on them as the boat burns and sinks. Indeed, 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. another surprising act of reinvention: a soaring work of historical fiction about a 'lady pilot' in the mid-20th century.

In that, Great Circle is consistently, often breathtakingly, sound. Great Circle grasps for and ultimately reaches something extraordinary. this far-ranging breadth is as much the project of this novel as any of these individual lives - including all the ways each life exists within the context of so many others, the way the natural world informs and forms us, all the ways we are still only and particularly ourselves. This is a book explicitly invested in sweep. Great Circle can sometimes feel a bit baggy, but that seems to be Shipstead’s intention.

But Great Circle starts high and maintains altitude. The start of Shipstead’s book is thrilling and complicated, with many different threads laid out and back stories carefully and richly wrought for the next 500-odd pages, I felt the fear I feel when a student’s work starts strong, when other novels open high - knowing that, more often than not, lofty heights can’t be sustained.

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