4.5 stars. I thought it would take me longer to finish this 600+ pager, but it really gripped me and kept me moving along. Excellent and exciting storytelling, focused on aviator Marian Graves, with great characters in both of the book’s timelines. Very well written -- for the most part, I’d say it’s filled with sentences that are a pleasure to read.

Some of Barclay’s actions (and the supposed reasoning behind them) didn’t really make sense to me, and that distracted me a bit. But it’s a fairly minor complaint, considering how much I liked the book overall.

Weaved into the story in both timelines are many memorable observations about friendship, love, adventure, heartache, sexual desire and pleasure, artistic expression, self-destruction, sexism, war, and atonement, not to mention aviation and film-making. There's also a cinematic sweep to the whole thing that is breathtaking at times (which I think is not always easy to do in writing), e.g. ships at sea, crossing mountains north of Montana and heading west to the Pacific, flying across Antarctica, etc.