Book Review: Great Circle (2021). Maggie Shipstead.

As someone who has been a pilot and involved with the aviation community for part of my adult life, and fascinated with the history and ongoing story of human flight ever since I was a young boy, a novel like this one, where the most important character is an early woman pilot, might be more appealing to me than to people who don’t know or care about flying.  But in fact, this excellent historical novel has been winning widespread acclaim and awards, so it’s safe to say that it has a wider appeal than just to flying enthusiasts.

There are really two main characters – one the famous woman pilot, whose unusual childhood and young adult experiences span the 1930s and 1940s, and the other a troubled young actress from our own era, who has won the part of the older woman in a movie about her famous around-the-world flight attempt, which ended in her disappearance.  But there are also a number of other important characters in the story, whose lives are intertwined with those of these two young women from different eras, and who are also struggling with their own personal demons and desires.

In the course of the story of these two parallel female lives, and the contemporaneous stories of their various friends, lovers and family members, we see how each person’s knowledge of the world, the skills they develop, and the sexual and relationship experiences they have, all shape the kind of people they become, and the things they achieve.

We also are reminded how mysterious every life is to the rest of the world, and how impossible it is to ever truly know everything about who a person was, what they thought and felt, and what they experienced over the course of their lives, from the scraps of written and photographic records they left behind, and the fading memories of those who knew them.

There is also a mystery that grows throughout the book, which is this: what happened to the woman pilot, when she disappeared in the last phase of her “great circle” flight around the world?  In this respect, the story reminds us of the unsolved mystery of Amelia Earhart and her earlier (real life) around-the-world flight, and it becomes a consuming question for the young actress, as she struggles to fully understand and know the story of the character she is playing on the screen.  But of course, I can’t tell you how it turns out . . .

This was a thoroughly enjoyable novel about a cast of interesting and relatable characters, living in two different modern time periods yet somehow connected.  Highly recommended.