[In the following excerpt, Rauch criticizes the way Mendelsohn alternates between the first and third person narrative in I Was Amelia Earhart.]

The mystery of Amelia Earhart's disappearance is the subject of Jane Mendelsohn's first novel. Whether Earhart lived or died is of secondary importance to Mendelsohn, who basks in the dreamy, terrifying magic of a plane roaring through the sky, then falling a mile to the sea. She basks as well in the imagination and despair of the woman—famous heroine, detached pilot—within the plane.

But she doesn't solve the mystery of Earhart's death. On a miraculous desert island, animals gather on the beach and communicate with Noonan, Earhart's navigator. Planes appear and disappear on the horizon; planes circle overhead; planes could rescue them; Amelia's downed Electra glints on the beach. There is solitude. There is a passionate love affair born of animosity. Then there is another flight, another crash, another desert island.

Is any of it real? Ambiguity is alluring: It highlights the impossibility of ever really knowing what happened, and makes the loss of Amelia and Noonan intensely sad. It also illustrates the expansiveness of fiction, and its limitations.

The narrative alternates between first and third person, which is disconcerting and ineffective, though explained: "Sometimes my thoughts are clearly mine, I hear them speak to me, in my own voice. Other times I see myself from far away, and my thoughts are ghostly, aerial, in the third person." But all this breaks down when, in the third person, we hear the inner workings of Noonan's consciousness, as if Mendelsohn doesn't know what she's doing with the narrator. And while there are some provocative sentences that could only come from a mind devoted to flying, like "The flight around the world contains within it everything inside me, all the life and all the death," some are repeated too often.

Mendelsohn's repetition, her confusing narrative and her melding of fantasy and reality make us feel as though we are witnessing someone else's dream: It's a little bit thrilling and a little bit boring.