Customer Reviews

I Was Amelia Earhart

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I came to this book full of the skepticism of someone who is sick of the media's deciding 'this is the book,' or 'this is the movie of the year.' What a surprise, therefore, to find that this book is not as good as they said -- it's BETTER. A compelling hybrid of Hemingway, Garcia Marquez, and Virgina Woolf, Mendelsohn really does deserve the praise she earned for this book -- and more. The mainstream press seems to have picked up on the Don Imus aspect of the success of the book -- and ignored the fact that it's beautifully, and brilliantly, written. And almost no one picked up on the book's exquisite irony, its dry wit, its utterly deadpan sense of humor. A really invigorating read, it makes me want to go back to college to take a course and discuss it further. It's that good. Of course the book's success may actually have hurt it in some ways (as some of the almost spiteful comments here indicate), made people fail to see the book on its own merits, but I have a feeling that her next book will more clearly establish Mendelsohn for what she is -- the writer of her generation -- and show that she is anything but a 'one-hit wonder.'

This is not the greatest novel ever written, nor does it ever pretend to be. However, it has been one of the very few contemporary stories that flirts with originality and exploits imagination.

I read this book on a long, long direct flight from New York to Tokyo a few months ago. Perhaps the way I read this book had alot to do with its impact on me. Had I read it on the ground I would have surely perceived it differently. I have always loved airplanes, I have always been in love with something and I have always, always (don't quite know why or how) been fascinated by the disappearance of this remarkable woman.

So take it on your next long flight. Pick a window seat and enjoy it. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in aviation, the vagueries of love and Amelia Earhart. I do not really see it as a novel, but it very well may be a profoundly eloquent, lengthy and enduring poem. One of the best in my recent memory.

Surely one wonders of the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart after her aircraft disappeared several decades ago. If one is curious about her life, read one of the biographies; If one is open to intrigue by fictional possibilities, Ms. Mendelsohn deserves an A+ for originality. Themes such as illusion and reality, the eternity of the soul, flirtation with death, escapism, living in the moment, and Eden, are blended with romance, surrealiwm and exquisite visuals. I Was Amelia Earhart is an intriguing contemporay novel and I look foward to more from this author.

This book is all about creating beautiful, dream-like images. When I first started it, I was annoyed by the shifts between first and third persons. When I returned to it I was in a quiet place at a quiet time. I was able to focus uninterruptedly upon the language and images. It was then that the full force of the book revealed itself. If you stand back and evaluate the plot alone it seems implausible and a little silly. But within the dream world Mendelsohn creates Amelia's thoughts are enlightening. When I finished it I turned back to page one and began reading it out loud. It was as if I experienced rather than read this story.

This is a tale of sadness and grandeur. A tale improbable and yet terrifyingly possible. Amelia Earhart is an unhappily married, misunderstood, generally dissatisfied woman whose only true joy comes from flying. In the sky she is alone and she is free. But even her flying can be overshadowed by her greedy, unsympathetic husband, who is also her manager. She has never related well to men, or to anyone, for that matter. Since childhood, she has admired lengendary lone women, the martyrs, the pioneers. And she became one. The book devotes much attention to the days before she embarks on her celebrated round-the-world flight. Her outlook on the world, and on herself, is shared with us intimately. We come to know those whom she trusts, and those whom she doesn't. We learn the technical details of her flight, and of catastrophic mistakes made in her preparations. We are with her in the cockpit, at 5:56am, as she takes off from Florida. And then she is lost. Her life on the deserted, uncharted atoll is a piercing psychological portrayal. Her ruminations are barbed, comical, and eloquent. Her survival of the crash is both miraculous and cursed. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, has also survived the crash. She never thought too highly of him to begin with, and now he has become her Adam in a South Pacific Garden of Eden. They are not very compatible. All they share is their flight experience, and their fate. But maybe that's enough. Yes, a love grows between them, a love of thorns and petals, of alternating silences and verbosity, of hostility and tenderness. Mendelsohn paints not an idyllic island existence, but an honest one, with a rapture and a wretchedness few of us will ever know. But above all that, Mendelsohn writes a love story which resonates.

I like the beginning, it is very captivating... it is as if she is talking directly to me from after life... or I am dreaming about meeting her in the Heaven, and she is telling the story of the last day of her life....

For that, I think the switching back and forth between first and third person works for me. It gives the illusive feels to the story.

The idea of the story is interesting. Amelia Earhart's life after the crash is more alive than the one she lived before. I think the author established that in the first page of the book "...What I know is that the life I lived since I died feels more real to me than the one I lived before..." Her life before that, she was trap in a marriage without love; a union of business instead of love. All her life she has wanted to fly, to fly away from life...her wishes seems to be granted when she crashed onto the isolated island. She is living her life. And most of all, she may be in love for the first time...

In this novel, her life may have just begun when the rest of the world think it has ended.

In my opinion, part 1 is beautifully written; however in part 2 the writing and the structure turn flat, like diary entries that are written quickly just to jot down the events, so that you'll remembered in the future. I find myself flip through the pages impatiently want to get to the end.

This book is for everyone who finds poetic and lyrical prose inviting. If you enjoyHerman Hesse or any author who writes prose that takes your breath away, this is it!!

There are essentially two halves to the book - pre-island life and island life. I did not particularly care for either half, though the first is a bit more lyrical. In the first hald, the prose is a bit surreal and dream-like, so if you are not into that literary style skip this book entirely. The second half consists of a fictional Amelia playing the TV show "Lost" only with two people and not interesting at all. The prose also goes completely flat. It's a bunch of jagged paragraphs. On top of all this, fans of Amelia are probably not going to like this either, as the fictional Amelia goes through a complete personality change that the author hints was always under the surface (she's not truly happy until she's stranded on a beach, naked with her navigator and drinking coconut juice - in other words, being a pilot didn't make her happy.) I just don't think this book is worth it, even though it's a slim volume and is not going to take days to read.

This book snuck up on me. I liked the author's style and images right away -- I felt pulled into the world of Amelia Earhart. The story was so beautifully and simply written that I tumbled on page after page not wanting to stop. I continued to be haunted by the events that were happening -- were they real, is she dreaming, am I reading about an Amelia that exists on the spiritual plane now? I loved the quality of how much space Amelia needed to finally feel truly happy. I also loved that her solitude made her potential rescue seem like a capture -- how hard to return to the world of society and conventions. Very haunting read.

The biggest fault of this little book (for me) was not the many licenses taken with the known facts. After all, it is a work of fiction, and a writer can make the South prevail at Gettysburg, for the sake of a good story. The real faults are in the very narration, i.e., the point of view shifts that are pretentious and annoying--and in the descent into romantic hogwash. Perhaps the readers of sappy romances will like the shift in Amelia's character and even believe it possible that such could occur, but it is not very satisfying to a reader who wants more from a book than sap. I just couldn't buy the premise, the point of views, and the denouement. I wish it were otherwise, because I wanted to like this.