Looking Back - I Was Amelia Earhart

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn
Fiction
1997 Vintage (first published in 1996)
Finished in January 1998
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.

There is her love affair with flying ("The sky is flesh") . . . .

There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine ("Heroines did what they wanted") . . . her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out before Christmas.

There is the flight itself -- day after magnificent or perilous or exhilarating or terrifying day ("Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it").

And there is, miraculously, an island ("We named it Heaven, as a kind of joke").

And, most important, there is Noonan . . .

My Original Notes (1998):

So-so. The first half was very good, but I got bored with the rest of the book. Maybe what would interest me more is a real biography. Fascinating woman but Mendelsohn tried too hard to turn Earhart's story into a romance novel. Blah.

My Current Thoughts:

I have no recollection of this book whatsoever.