I found this book while looking through Goodreads for a recommendation. The author was described as a New York Times best-selling author. How is it that so many authors are NYT best-selling authors? I guess with a list of 15 each week in different categories there is a chance for hundreds per year to shine as best-selling authors even with repeat appearances on the list. Anyway ....
The book is "historical fiction" in which real events are woven into the story of a character created by the author. The story is about the first woman to attempt to fly in a great circle around a polar orbit in during 1950.
Marian Graves is the pilot who gets the flying bug early in her life and becomes one in an era when women were constrained by men to child-bearing and cooking. Twins, Marian and Jaime Graves, were rescued from a sinking ship that caught fire. Their father, Addisin Graves, was the captain of the ship who rescued them instead of going down with the ship as the captains were "expected to do". For this "cowardly" act (of not going down with the ship even though he did this to save his infant twins) he was imprisoned for ten years and the twins were raised by their drunken artist uncle. Unbeknownst to the Captain, the owner of the ship Lloyd Feiffer, had loaded the ship with armaments to fight the Germans and also to get additional revenue to save his struggling shipping company, that exploded during the voyage and caused the fire that sank the ship.
As a teenager, Marian gets the bootlegger Barclay Macqueen for a rich benefactor who is obsessed with her. Barclay buys a plane and pays for her to learn to fly and eventually marries her. Marian flies the airplane to smuggle liquor across the Canada-US border for Barclay. After some time, she leaves Barclay and makes a life of the only female bush pilot in Alaska. During the second world war, as a part of women-pilots' team, Marian flies non-combat missions taxiing or transporting airplanes when they need to be moved around.
The first part of the ~600-page book is about the dysfunctional relashipship between Marian and Barclay, the struggles of her brother Jaime and her friendship with Caleb, her occasional lover. Just the last 90 pages of the book describe thMarian's flight around the polar orbit.
The book, although I wouldn't call it "non-put-downable", is still a compelling read. By the way, for Central New Jersey readers there is a reference to the fact that Charles Lindberg owned a house and lived for a few years in Hopewell, NJ. I went looking for the house but couldn't get to it because it is now owned by the state of NJ that runs some facility for juveniles in it. So much for historical importance of the house.
