review of great circle by maggie shipstead

Shipstead's story begins decades earlier, with the christening of the Josephina Eterna in Glasgow in 1909. 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. 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 playing Marian in a biopic. She was uncanny, unknowable except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky': These are the musings of actress Hadley Baxter. 'We were both products of vanishment and orphanhood and negligence and airplanes and uncles. 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.

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

Review of great circle by maggie shipstead