Maggie Shipstead's The Great Circle
So this was on a zillion best-of lists and has been nominated for a lot of awards, but it took me forever to get around to reading it, and it didn’t totally work for me. It’s about a famous lady pilot who mysteriously disappeared decades ago, and the troubled actress who's going to play her in a movie, who has some odd similarities to her role. The first half of this had some slow parts (also a lot of sexual assault, content warnings galore) and I was more interested in the actress and her drama (I have read /too/ many books about lady pilots and do not need so many airplane details), but even as things picked up for the pilot's story in the second half, the actress' story became tiresome (learn to live without a man already). I could have done without the more “literary” sections (the shroom-addled meditation on LA was a choice) and I felt like a big reveal was seeded early on that never came to be, but maybe I misunderstood. Mixed feelings on the ending, too. B.
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