A review by hypocretin
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

4.0

This is such an annoying book to review. There was so much here that spoke to me, that inspired and touched and stayed with me. So much beautiful writing, such grounded and well-realized characters. This is annoying because those parts exclusively belong to the Marian storyline. 
 
I found everything in Hadley’s section of the book so flat and uninspired it honestly surprises me that it came from the same author. I understand what Shipstead was going for in terms of themes and broader ideas—which I broadly appreciate and agree with—but it was just so lacking in the texture and nuance that characterized the Graves thread I felt like none of those ideas really landed. 
 
Her chapters felt, at best, like a waste of time. I’m stubbornly committed to not skipping around in books or speeding up the performance, so I listened to all her chapters and I just truly wish I hadn’t. There were a couple of moments where events in the Graves thread were foreshadowed or revealed through Hadley’s perspective of events, and some of those times—including
the revelation that Marian did survive her last flight
!!!—actively made my experience of the narrative worse. It made
Marian’s survival
about fulfilling Hadley’s personal arc. It made it feel cheap and unearned and I was instantly prepared to just hate the whole ending. 
 
Now, luckily, I do not hate the ending, because Marian Graves (
Martin Wallace!!
) does earn that ending. There were some extraordinarily beautiful ideas and phrasings in those last chapters, but also in all of her sections. 
 
The writing alone in Marian’s thread is just dead gorgeous. It’s lyrical and lingering, very light with its touch on detail, and yet so incredibly grounded in a sense of reality? There’s nothing dreamlike or fanciful about any of it despite how soulful and expressive it is. It reminded me a lot of my experience of reading Demon Copperhead, although with a much different inner voice than the one guiding the story here. 
 
But also, just thematically with its stories and characters. These sections have so much compassion and thoughtful exploration in them. It is an incredibly honest and tender depiction of
grooming and abuse
. It never shies from the complexity of things, the imperfectness of the honest story where we want clear answers and clean emotions. I love it. It means the world to me. 
 
So, how then to rate the book as a whole? I think probably the 5-star scale isn’t always the best way to measure art, but in the spirit of the sport I’m giving it a 4, because I think the good outweighs the bad. I still really loved this book, and if they ever release a hardcover edition that is only Marian’s thread I will be the first in line to buy it. 

“If it had been her, she would have done what he said he would do: walked in the winter night far away from camp and lain in the snow, under the stars and the aurora. Or maybe not—it is not lost on her she had twice failed to choose death. She’d written in her logbook that her life was her one possession. She had kept it; she had wanted it.”
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