Reviews with content warning for Alcoholism - O Grande Círculo

. This is my favorite type of novel, one that spans many decades and weaves together plots and destinies. Only knocking it down .25 because I wanted a smidge more closure surrounding Harley’s story.

Content Warnings

nicoles_reading_corner's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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frogknitting's review against another edition

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adventurous reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

2.5

The good: it was extremely well researched. The realism was very high, and I enjoyed the individual lines of prose.

However, the longer I read the book, the more it started to grate on me. This book really, really didn't need to be as long as it was. The movie bits, while entertaining, were so sparse throughout that they seemed pretty much useless. They could've done something with how the public perceives her now as an epilogue type thing.
Also, this book is extremely sexual. There aren't even any real sex scenes within it, but essentially everyone has sex with everyone else (an exaggeration, but not much of one), and people commit adultery like it's nothing. There's no way this many people would be alright with that, this many times.
The first half of the book was more compelling, but it drug on for so long. It spend so much time

with Barclay, that when she left him, it seemed like we were just running along. Okay, this happens, now this, now this. There was barely anything about the flight itself!!

Also, idk, something made me uncomfortable about them bringing in Sitting in the Water Grizzly as a comparison to Marian, a white woman who is more comfortable in men's clothes. Now I know about a queer Indigenous historical figure, but he wasn't represented well in this story at all.
Another thing: the characters in this seemed like vessels with which to tell the story. I read about Marian for 650 pages and I really didn't care about her once I was done with the book. I couldn't tell you much about her. She's determined? Loves to fly? Masculine and doesn't want a stereotypical relationship? Same for most of the other characters. Hadley was more fleshed out, but we saw so little of her that it didn't really matter.
Finally (finally!) I didn't like the ending.

It seemed like a cop out — you thought Marian died? Of course she didn't, you just think that because that's what's expected! She found some random guys and hid with them before running away to New Zealand, although that wasn't foreshadowed at all throughout the book! It was a rushed ending, and I wasn't a big fan of it.

This book could have done with serious editing and cut backs. By the end, I was just skimming. I think it would've been better at about 400 pages without the Hadley/movie subplot, as interesting as it was. Alternatively, focused it more on a half/half split between the two, instead of the 90% Marian that we got.

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mirireads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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jesshindes's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Great Circle tells two stories in parallel, hopping between the different narrative threads: the story of Marian Graves, a female pilot in the first half of the twentieth century; and that of Hadley Baxter, a Hollywood film star recruited to play Marian in the eventual movie of her life. It's a 600-page book but it still manages to feel compressed and efficient, as Shipstead drops us in and out of Hadley and especially Marian's lives at intervals ranging from months to years, deftly handling the story's lengthy timespan. This chronological scope is matched geographically: the characters' 'home bases' are Montana and LA but we are taken all over the world, from the UK to the tiniest Pacific atolls to the great white blankness of Antarctica. Shipstead conjures all of them in vivid detail, sometimes from the bird's-eye perspective of Marian in her plane but often at ground-level, down among the mud.

I loved this book. Shipstead is a hugely compelling storyteller whose characters I found it easy to care about and whose narrative and settings felt fresh. Her omniscient narration offers the reader frequent insights into even minor characters' experiences, so that you get the sense of a complex world peopled with complex characters each of whom is driven by their particular hopes and fears. It also means that as reader, you are often privileged to information that other characters don't have: for example, when Marian's twin brother Jamie runs away to spend a summer in Seattle, we see his experience in detail and in a way that Marian herself learns only a good deal later. This experience sits alongside the contrasting thread of Hadley's investigations into Marian's history. It's not an original plot (I'm thinking of AS Byatt's Possession as the obvious example) but Shipstead uses it to make a point about the way that we understand history - effective in a big, whole-of-the-20th-century, book - and also about the limits to our knowledge of others. Even the reader, one step ahead for most of the novel, must wait until the very end for the book - for Marian's narrative - to cede its last secret.

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baguettegay's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I thought this was just okay. For all of the wonderful things I’ve heard about it, I guess I just expected too much. I actually skimmed the last few chapters and just read the ending.
It wasn’t all bad; I think the two lives that Marian and Hadley both led existing as parallels was brilliant. I just think the time jumps were weird and it took me 100+ pages to feel any sort of connection to either story line.

I also take off stars when there are unnecessary assault scenes (not one, not two, but too many.) There are plenty of other ways to make a point without detailing something so incredibly horrific on more than one occasion.

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c_dalton's review against another edition

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adventurous hopeful inspiring sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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