SOURCE: A review of I Was Amelia Earhart, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 12, March 18, 1996, pp. 57-8.

[In the following review, the critic praises Mendelsohn's first novel and calls her a writer to watch.]

[In I Was Amelia Earhart,] past and present, fact and fiction, first-person and third blend into a life of the celebrated aviatrix—both before and after her famed disappearance in 1937, at age 39—that unfolds with the surreal precision of a dream and that marks first novelist Mendelsohn as a writer to watch. "The sky is flesh," begins the first of the scores of discrete vignettes and reflections that make up the narrative, an apt start to a story drenched in sensuality and the pursuit of it. The Earhart limned here is materialistic, glory-seeking, sexually hungry, outrageously self-absorbed and utterly charismatic. Telling her tale with ruthless honesty in both her own voice and that of the...