I Was Amelia Earhart
(Knopf, 1996)
“In this lyrical first novel…Ms. Mendelsohn has chosen to use the bare-boned outlines of the aviator’s life as an armature for a poetic meditation on freedom and love and flight…. She manages to make this highly whimsical story feel oddly convincing…. She does not try to pass her story off as history, but rather imaginatively transfigures her material. The resulting novel, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s General in His Labyrinth or Larry McMurtry’s Anything for Billy, invokes the spirit of a mythic personage, while standing on its own as a powerfully imagined work of fiction. Ms. Mendelsohn invests her story with force of fable.”
“[The book] appears like a flash of silver in the leaden skies of contemporary fiction. It is a haunting and delicate piece of guesswork…. Mendelsohn is the sort of writer who takes the oyster as her world rather than the other way around: her book outlines a small space for itself to inhabit and then goes about filling in this space with shadowy patches, daubs of bright color, and areas that seem to be the prose equivalent of white paint. Her novel is, indeed, drenched in visual effects…. Its quiet air of astonishment lends the shine of newness to everything it touches.”
“Not to be missed. It is an immediately addicting book, as telegraphic as those of Marguerite Duras, and as charged with longing.”
— Liesl Schillinger, Harper’s Bazaar
“A great read…. The book does spirit you aloft. It brings Amelia Earhart to life, more than any straight biography ever could.”
— Katherine Whittamore, Salon
“A tantalizing fictional biography of Amelia Earhart…slim and idiosyncratic as its heroine…. The pleasures of reading this book are many.”
— The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Reads like a kind of dream…. Mendelsohn delivers a fantasy from deep within Earhart’s consciousness.”
— Denver Post
“Elegant and sensuously beautiful…. A psychologically rich portrait of a highly unusual woman.”
— Booklist
“Vividly imagined and complex…a soaring prose meditation.”
“Mendelsohn’s rhapsodic language and shimmering, dream-like imagery will carry readers along on her voyage into the many mysteries this work contains…. A sensual, intoxicating experience.”
— The Louisville Courier-Journal
“Mendelsohn [is] an exquisite crafter of prose…. Brilliant…is not too strong a word to describe what Mendelsohn has done…. Her novel will hold you spellbound.”
— Newark Sunday Star-Ledger
“Insinuating and even addictive… a vehicle for dreaming.”
— The Village Voice
“Brilliantly evokes an imagined destiny.”
“…unfolds with the surreal precision of a dream and that marks first novelist Mendelsohn as a writer to watch…. Calculatedly lovely and moving.”
— School Library Journal
“Fascinating… The prose soars with lightness and imagination.”
— Winston-Salem Journal
“Lush [and] mesmerizing…. Mendelsohn gives us not so much a stream of consciousness as a stream of dreamlike images to float on.”
— Hartford Courant
“Sparely written, almost visionary…a paean to the ultimate escape.”
“Strange, slight, but wonderful: a modest portrait that manages to create moments of exceptional intensity and power of feeling.”
“Compelling. You can’t help admiring the boldness of a writer who would make fiction of a legend.”
“Exciting…. It’s testimony to the power of the Earhart myth, and to Mendelsohn’s sparkling prose, that the reader is quickly enraptured…. This is entertainment of a high order.”
— Lexington Herald-Leader
Burning Down the House
(Knopf, 2016)
“With gorgeous, feverishly imaginative descriptions of her tormented characters’ psyches, and settings ranging from Manhattan to Istanbul to Laos, Mendelsohn, oracular, dazzling, and shocking, creates a maelstrom of tragic failings and crimes, exposing the global reach of the violent sex-trafficking underworld, and excoriating those among the ‘planetary elite’ who allow it to metastasize.”
“With her devastating eye for the telling detail, her always penetrating insight, and her quiet wit, Jane Mendelsohn has written a book for the ages, an extraordinary investigation of human vanity and vulnerability, of power and disenfranchisement, of luxury and sorrow. Her writing is both taut and lush, her wounded characters both extravagant and authentic, her story grand yet intimate. This is literature of the first order.”
— Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree, winner of the National Book Award
“The author of the 1990s bestseller I Was Amelia Earhart here focuses on a wealthy New York family beset by internal rivalries and an involvement, perhaps unwitting, in a dark underworld of international crime. Mendelsohn’s novel hopscotches the globe from Manhattan to London, Rome, Laos, and Turkey, trailing intrigue and ill-spent fortunes.”
— The Millions, “Most Anticipated: The Great 2016 Book Preview”
“A powerful parable for ultra-globalized times.”
— Vogue
“Powerful. . . . Thrilling. . . . There are flashes of stunning beauty.”
— Paste
American Music
(Knopf, 2010)
“Redefines the genre… Exacting, moving, devastating, American Music is a story told in dazzling images…. How can something so slim cover so much ground? This breadth is achieved through a series of haunting impressions that trace the story of a family, the history of 20th-century America, and the evolution of American music… Although we meet these characters hastily, we come to know them well. It is a testament to Mendelsohn’s skill that she can decode a lifetime in an image.”
— Jennifer Gilmore, The New York Times Book Review
“Unpretentious, moving, intelligent, and fresh . . . An inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.”
— Kate Christensen, Elle Magazine lead review
“Stories appear in all their glorious detail—bits of sparkling fabric, pieces of song, a whirling dance, a white sky and a black sea. Jane Mendelsohn captures them as you might in the glare of an old-fashioned light bulb… Milo and Honor fall in love. Love is the mirage they step into, leaving behind all kinds of wounds and stories. It is an aleph of a novel, a keyhole one looks into and cannot pull away from.”
— Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
“A novel about the power of stories… What a captivating storyteller Mendelsohn can be. She’s remarkably good at setting scenes quickly and evocatively, raising up characters we care about immediately and drawing us into their conflicts… A romantic story of romantic stories, full of love and longing, despair and loneliness, and one woman’s connection to all of them… [Mendelsohn] writes the kind of lovely, wise phrases that will have you underlining passages.”
— Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“In her exquisite, psychologically fluent novels, the actual and imagined merge as Mendelsohn tests the power of stories to define, guide, and sometimes destroy us. Her third novel is an intricate puzzle of haunting, far-reaching, secretly connected love stories. . . Each milieu is sensuously rendered, while music, especially jazz, serves as the unifying force, and the key to surviving epic desire and loss.”
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“As in her earlier novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, Jane Mendelsohn proves a master of historical context: American history itself is as much a character as those who live and die through it.”
— The Courier (Charleston)
“Jane Mendelsohn has produced a taut, sui generis story that should be a major contender for novel of the year… Brilliant, stunning and divinely thought-provoking.”
— Sacramento Book Review
“Luminous . . . [a] relationship between a wounded Iraq War veteran and his physical therapist releases a torrent of memories, dreams, and alternate lives . . . a magically consoling reminder that beneath the starkest cases of wounding and healing is the music of love lost and found.”
“Jane Mendelsohn’s American Music, a beautiful, bittersweet novel…. More characters mysteriously emerge: a jazz lover choosing between two women; a sultan’s concubine falling for her guard. Honor’s touch, meant to heal Milo, frees the stories locked within him. As the two try to understand these images, they discover that what we keep inside has the power to break us — but also to break us open.”
— Carolyn Wilsey, O, The Oprah Magazine
“There are hidden universes within us, Jane Mendelsohn tells us in her strange and bittersweet story about fate and love. How we fit into the rhythm of such places and how we allow our pasts to shape the present, are the intriguing themes of her haunting new book.”
— The Miami Herald
“‘A soldier’s body is a work of art that contains his country’s history.’” So thinks the heroine of this luminous novel, a physical therapist named Honor….. Intricately plotted and affectingly written, American Music…[is] a piercing, magical revelation about the capricious power of disclosed truths to lift us up or take us down.”
“Like Honor and Milo, the reader is eager to find out what happens and how these seemingly unrelated stories connect. This intriguing book will be particularly appealing to readers with vivid imaginations who are open to a more innovative narrative style.”
— Library Journal
“Beautifully rendered…. [Joe, Pearl, and Vivian’s] story is a heartbreaker, stark in its reality…. Powerful… Hard to forget.”
— The Providence Journal
“Haunting, mystical and beautiful, American Music is written in a uniquely creative style that poignantly and powerfully touches the reader contemplating the gift of music in an American period of history yearning for recovery and renewal.”
“American Music is like Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets the very best parts of The Time Traveler’s Wife, and for readers who savor language and enjoy surrealism, it doesn’t get much better. 5 out of 5.”
— The Book Lady’s Blog
Innocence
(Riverhead Books, 2000)
“Sexy, sinister magic…this dark and gothically twisted novel gives us the city as a wicked stepmother’s poisonous fruit, its beauty baneful, its sweetness deadly…. Mendelsohn’s genius lies in her ability to keep both the fantastical and the ordinary in focus at the same time…a brilliant balancing act, a truly thrilling read…. Remarkable.”
— Newsday
“Innocence is a kind of Rosemary’s Baby channeled through J.D. Salinger…. It’s a graceful, delusionary teenage thriller unusually in touch with young character’s emotional workings, and, at the same time, a book by someone who clearly understands the tricks that make Stephen King’s pages turn.”
— Dennis Cooper, The Village Voice
“Jane Mendelsohn plays it fast and loose with reality…. Innocence is fast-edged and jagged…daring and beautiful language…an important book.”
— The Oregonian
“Invoking a battery of analogues favoring the pop-culture heroines of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Lolita, and Halloween, Mendelsohn isolates her plucky heroine so fearfully via sparse paragraphs and an underpeopled world that even the most preposterous threats leap out of the movie frame to fuel a shriek of pure paranoia. Must reading for anybody who thinks teenagers today have gotten bloated with entitlement: a scarlet will-o’-the-wisp fantasy in which adults and adulthood aren’t stupid stiffs but agents of unimaginable evil.”
“Combining a savvy intelligence with lyrical prose…Mendelsohn has concocted a coming-of-age tale about a Manhattan girl’s adolescence; this is the story of innocence, all right, but that nebulous concept today means finding your way in a media-saturated, sometimes dangerous culture.”
— USA Today
“A brilliant gothic tale… Mendelsohn’s novel is a harrowing cry of anguish, the siren song of a generation that believes continuing to live beyond one’s teens is a matter of ambiguous choice.”
“Laconic and edgy and begrudgingly tragic…the novel is onto itself as well as the formulas it exposes, offering a darkly appealing glance at popular culture and modern urban mayhem. Like Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City….”
“Innocence is an engrossing, and disturbing, account of its protagonist’s quest to uncover the truth about herself and the world around her.”
“Mendelsohn is a smart, clever writer who has created a…novel that rivets with well-paced scenes, lyrical prose, and moments of profound insight. By playing with the worst stereotypes about women and giving eloquent nod to her cinematic forebears, Mendelsohn gives voice and image to a new generation’s female howl.”
— The Providence Sunday Journal
“[Mendelsohn] cooks up a stew of paranoia and gothic fantasy that makes for a surprisingly unique mystery novel. Told in spare, melodramatic vignettes, the book has elements of both an epic poem and a horror-film screenplay….”
— Janet Steen, Time Out New York