Innocence » (Unabridged)

Jane Mendelsohn is a graduate of Yale University. She is the author of two previous novels, including the New York Times best seller I Was Amelia Earhart. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The Village Voice, The Yale Review, The London Review of Books, and The Guardian. She lives with her husband and two children in New York City.

An electrifying follow-up to her bestselling I Was Amelia Earhart, Jane Mendelsohn's Innocence is a modern gothic coming-of-age story, a devastating X-ray of American culture, and a piercing exploration of a teenage girl growing up in New York City. Narrated with incisive wit by fourteen-year-old Becket, the novel traces her relationship with her widowed father, her encounters with the intimidating Beautiful Girls at school, her attraction to the mysterious and dangerous school nurse, her attachment to the raffish Tobey, and a series of devastating nightmares that threaten Becket's life as she moves from girl to woman.

Mendelsohn has written an allegory about the precarious state of the American teenager in a culture that sucks the life force out of its young, who are nurtured by the movies and fantasy and narcissism rather than by values such as honesty and love. This is a world as startingly original and hauntingly familiar as our dreams, where the line between fantasy and reality, between sanity and insanity, is razor-thin. Playful, frightening, profound, and gripping, Innocence is the rare thing - a page turner with the depth of poetry and the immediacy of cinema.

Book Magazine

Mendelsohn's first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, the famous aviatrix crashed on a desert isle, fell in love with her navigator and experienced the salvation of human love. In her newest book, Mendelsohn explores another kind of crack up. This sad, disturbing tale of lost mental control revolves around a teen-ager nicknamed Beckett, who experiences "coming of age" as if she's inside a horror film. Beckett purports to offer insight into a generation of teen-agers destroyed by fantasy, fiction and movies while decrying a country that does not defend its children. The book seethes with boredom, narcissism and violence: the psychiatrist gets stabbed in the eye, the stepmother in the heart. One wonders how an author of such breathtaking talent could release a novel that is, by turns, bloody, tedious, tortuous, confusing, disturbing and overwritten.
—Ethel Hammer