SOURCE: "A Refuge from Politics, as Well as a Refuge for the Imagination," in The Christian Science Monitor, May 8, 1996, p. 15.

[In the following excerpt, Rubin asserts that escape is at the center of Mendelsohn's I Was Amelia Earhart.]

Jane Mendelsohn's first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, could be summed up as a paean to the ultimate escape. Taking as her starting point what is known of the mysterious disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart on her uncompleted final round-the-world flight, Mendelsohn has imagined not only the fate that might have befallen Earhart and her hapless navigator, Fred Noonan, but also the thoughts, memories, emotions, and longings that propelled this woman into a life of flight.

Jane Mendelsohn has composed this novel as a sequence of short, sparely written, almost visionary passages. Third-person descriptions of Earhart and Noonan on their final voyage alternate with first-person accounts, written in Earhart's voice...