SOURCE: "Two 'What If' Stories of a Famous Flier," in Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1996, p. E5.

[In the following excerpt, Heeger asserts that Mendelsohn's I Was Amelia Earhart is "a brief, brilliant study in redemption, a meditation on love and loneliness that steers far away from mawkishness."]

Good news, Amelia Earhart fans. This summer your elusive hero flies again in two recently published novels that can be knocked off in a couple of beach days. And I do recommend the beach. Both are largely set on desert islands, the kind where palm trees sway and the only beverage comes in coconuts. Both are first novels that suggest that Amelia—who vanished in 1937 on a trans-world flight—didn't go down in a blast of fire but landed safely on some atoll with her navigator, Fred. That she and Fred, improbably, fell in love. And that's about all these two...