GREAT CIRCLE is a sweep of a novel – soaring with the ambitious tenacity of young Marian Graves, yet tender as her artistic brother, Jamie, who though he cannot harm animal nor man, is recruited to document World War II through drawings that capture time and space in a way that few other artists are capable of. She has the opportunity to redeem herself with the role of a lifetime – playing Marian Graves, the first woman to attempt the Great Circle, who supposedly crashed into the sea, never to be found. The stories of Marian and Jamie are juxtaposed against the story of a current day actress, Hadley Jones, whose career is on the shoals after her latest scandalous affair. Marian wants nothing more than to be the first woman to fly the Great Circle from pole to pole, and she will do almost anything to achieve her goal. Barclay McQueen becomes obsessed with Marian and offers to pay for her flying lessons and a loaned airplane Marian accepts but knows that there will be a price to pay for his generosity.
It’s there that she meets Barclay McQueen, a rancher in theory, but a racketeer at heart. One of her deliveries is to the local brothel, where the ladies dress her up and put makeup on her. She cuts her hair short and is often mistaken for a boy, much to Jamie’s chagrin. At fourteen, she runs moonshine for a local bootlegger, driving a truck advertising Stanley’s Bread and Cake. Marian is driven to find a way to pay for flying lessons. “She was at an age when the future adult rattles the child’s bones like the bars of a cage.”
When Marian encounters the Flying Brayfogles, two barnstormers from a defunct Flying Circus, she becomes fixated on learning to fly. The twins are left to themselves most of the time – their uncle releasing them “into the wilderness like a pair of dogs trusted to return eventually.” Jamie, like his uncle, is a gifted artist.
Soon after, they are sent to live with their indifferent uncle Warren, a man who had at one time been a promising artist but shows a greater commitment to gambling and drink than to his work or his obligations. GREAT CIRCLE by Maggie Shipstead opens with the rescue of twins from a sinking ocean liner in 1909 Marian and Jamie Graves are rescued by their father, but their mother perishes.
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