I Was Amelia Earhart

Narrator Blair Brown evokes Jane Mendelsohn's view of Amelia Earhart as ethereal, dreamy, self-absorbed, and ambitious. What if Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, got lost and crashed on a tiny island in the Pacific and nicknamed it "heaven"? It's an appealing premise. Brown's voice soars and swoops like Earhart's Electra in the sky as the pair live for years undiscovered and not wanting to be found. It's a pity that the point of view changes continually from first person to third person for no particular reason that the listener can discern. Earhart doesn't seem that likable here. Her first boyfriend accuses her of being "intimately heartless," and Brown's fine performance captures that exact essence. A.B. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

April 1, 1996
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 self she sees "from far away... ghostly, aerial," she speaks of her days as America's sweetheart, as the wife of publisher G.P. Putnam. Diverting from the historical record, she also speaks of the years after she and her navigator, Frederick J. Noonan, "a drunk," crash-land on a South Sea island that they name "Heaven, as a kind of joke," but that becomes a decent approximation as the years slip by and the castaways discover happiness in nature and in each other's arms. When rescue seems eminent, Earhart and Noonan take to the air one last time, and crash one last time, perhaps into eternity but in any case into an existence defined by not by control but by "abandonment"-a message in keeping with the story's theme but in fact an ironic one for a novel as calculatedly lovely and moving as this one.

With the intriguing premise that Amelia Earhart tells us what happened on her ill-fated flight, Mendelsohn has captured a broad audience with this surprise bestseller. Blair Brown is a great choice to recount Earhart's reminiscences and tell her tale. Brown's soft, steady voice is best with a first-person narrative. She quietly and compellingly tells listeners details of Earhart's life and draws a portrait, not only with words, but also with vocal coloration. Brown leads listeners into Earhart's life and entices us to be her confidant. A smooth and enticing peformance. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine