That changes, however, after the king bootlegger falls for the adolescent Marian and buys her an airplane and a flight instructor. But no one will give a girl flying lessons, and she doesn’t have a plane. Inspired by men and women traveling as barnstormers, Marian sees the newly developed airplane as a ticket to a more adventurous life. Marian’s world is one where women who earn their own way are prostitutes, and she must disguise herself as a boy to get a job as a delivery driver for a local bootlegger in Missoula. “She was uncanny, unknowable, except for a few constellations I recognized from my own sky.” “She was like her but wasn’t,” Hadley tells herself of Marian. The two lives intersect when the actress wins the role of Marian in a much-anticipated biopic. She has an affair with a pop music star while living with a philandering boyfriend who happens to be her love interest in “Archangel.” This destroys the romantic fantasies of young women everywhere. Hadley’s soaring career suddenly takes a nosedive on social media. And both are women trying to carve their own paths through life.ĭespite being more than 70 years apart, their hurdles are quite similar in their efforts to negotiate societal double standards of expected gender roles and sex on demand from men with the power to give or deny them their goals.Ī young Hadley even stumbles upon Marian’s story, looking to the pilot without parents, raised by an uncle, to try and find answers in her Hollywood life. But they both grew up orphaned, raised by inattentive Bohemian uncles, Marian’s a starving painter and alcoholic, Hadley’s a semi-successful producer and drug addict. The determined and gutsy Marian would seem to have nothing in common with the spoiled and privileged Hadley. Hadley Baxter is a B-list Hollywood actress who grew up in the Nickelodeon age of child stars and landed a starring role in the romantic blockbuster series “Archangel,” kind of a defanged “Twilight” that makes her America’s sweetheart of social media darlings. By about midway through the novel, the reader gets an urge to stop and Google this colorful figure from history alongside real pilots such as Amelia Earhart.
Shipstead writes so convincingly of the fictitious Graves, she even quotes footnotes from a book reportedly based on her flight logbook.
Marian Graves is a girl who wants to be a pilot in the early 20th century, a time when women couldn’t even vote much less work in paying jobs where they defied gravity and risked crashing into mountains. This book is richly layered, a joy to read in Shipstead’s colorful and easy style. Glitz and guts square off in “Great Circle,” the riveting new novel by Los Angeles author Maggie Shipstead.Ĭunningly crafted, Shipstead weaves a tale of two women, set apart by a century, fighting to retain control of their own lives in a society that demands subservience.
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