She attended Horace Mann School in New York, and she is a graduate of Yale University 1987, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa.
Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, “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….
[2] Daphne Merkin wrote in The New Yorker that the novel “appears like a flash of silver in the leaden skies of contemporary fiction.
Reviewers admired the allegorical qualities of the gothic horror tale and the poetry of the writing,[5] while others read the book as straightforward genre fiction.
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.” Kirkus Reviews also praised the book: “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 move 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.”[6] American Music, published in 2010, tells the story of Milo, an Iraq War veteran with PTSD, and Honor, his somatic therapist.
[Mendelsohn] writes the kind of lovely, wise phrases that will have you underlining passages.” Kate Christensen wrote in a lead review for Elle, “Unpretentious, moving, intelligent, and fresh .
Burning Down the House, Mendelsohn’s most recent book, about the rivalries and secrets of a wealthy New York real estate clan, was published in 2016.
Donna Seaman gave the novel a Booklist starred review, writing, “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.”[9] Andrew Solomon, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for his nonfiction book Far from the Tree, noted the novel’s prescience, writing, “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.