Marian's childhood in Missoula, Mont., is largely unsupervised she and her twin brother, Jamie, roam the countryside, their guardian a benevolent but distracted uncle. Hadley Baxter's Los Angeles is captured in a slightly wrier tone than Marian's sections: "Behind every film is a mountain of spicy tuna, an ocean of San Pellegrino," Hadley remarks, suffering through an industry lunch. Shipstead's intellect and knowledge are on full display when the novel slows to survey the workings of boats and planes the same is true during flashes of exposition about the process of painting or making a film. Swinging from first person to third, from one century to the next, from the moneyed splendor of cities to the shifting Antarctic ice, Shipstead's prose overflows with meticulous detail, particularly when it focuses on the machinery of transportation. Hadley's interest in the life of a historic pilot, Marian Graves, intersects with her work when she portrays Marian in a film. Shipstead saddles this particular heroine with numerous tragedies - her parents die in a plane crash her uncle, who takes her in after her parents' death, dies of an overdose - all in the space of a few pages.
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