Amelia Lost

The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart 

By Candace Fleming

Schwartz & Wade, 2011

$18.99, ages 8-12, 128 pages.

Award-winning Fleming strips away the mystique surrounding legendary aviatrix Amelia Earhart to show a woman as fallible as any other -- yet driven to conquer the air like no woman before her.

"All I wished to do in the world was to be a vagabond in the air," Earhart once said, and though Earhart met criticism in her later career for profiting from aviation, it was this guiding dream that's defined Earhart at least until her death.

When Earhart's plane vanished in 1937, her husband, late publisher George Putnam, worried that her disappearance would overshadow her legacy, and for some perhaps it has, yet Fleming doesn't dwell on Earhart's disappearance but lets it fade in and out of chapters about her life.

Fleming (The Great and Only Barnum) makes sure we see Earhart for what she was, a typical woman in many ways, but uniquely driven. As biographer Mary S. Lovell described Earhart, she was "an ordinary girl growing into an extraordinary woman who dared to attempt seemingly unattainable goals in a man's world."

We meet a woman who was at times impulsive and headstrong, who with Putnam could work the media and profited greatly from her record-setting feats, yet who had unstoppable courage and enthusiasm, and who not only earnestly believed a woman could do everything a man could do, but wanted other women to believe that to.

Night Flight: Amelia Earhart Crosses the Atlantic

By Robert Burleigh

Paintings by Wendell Minor

A Paula Wiseman Book, 2011

$16.99, ages 4-8, 40 pages

If words could fly, these would.

In this poetic account of aviatrix Amelia Earhart's solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, readers feel like they're taking off with her, and imagine what she must have seen and felt.

Burleigh's words thrill with their immediacy and momentum, while Minor's paintings envelop readers in the vastness and mercurial nature of the sky.

From the moment Earhart's single-engine Vega rolls down the dirt runway in Newfoundland en route to France, readers find themselves surrendering to whatever will happen.

It is May 1932. Earhart "pushes her last doubts into a secret place deep inside her," and readers too take in a deep breath and feel the plane's wheels go faster and faster. Her courage will now be their own.

Once the Vega is aloft, solitude embraces readers; "the plane swoops like a swallow" over tundra and ascends higher into the waning light of late day, rising upward until they can no longer hear the surf.

"Amelia Earhart lives for this moment: / to follow the wide horizon that never ends!" Burleigh writes -- and we imagine we live for it too.

At first the mood of the flight is one of bliss. The night is calm and the Vega soars eastward into "wisps of shimmering clouds" and expanses of glistening stars.

Earhart feels at ease and indulges in reflection about "first-time things"; among them, standing before whirling propellers as a young girl: "The props send puffs of soft snow into her delighted eyes."

Her mind soars with all that's she's looked down upon and her conviction "to try to do things as men have tried."  There is an expectation that the trip will remain smooth and sure.

"But she is wrong," Burleigh writes, his words hauntingly unequivocal in the last line on the page, as the ocean grows choppy and lives up to his description as "dark and seething."

Midnight arrives abruptly with a flash of lightning, its tendrils reaching down before her path.

"Fists of rain pummel the cockpit windshield," stirring Earhart from a half-dream; is it thunder or her heart pounding?