A Northern Light
by Jennifer Donnelly
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jennifer DonnellyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-09-01
ISBN: 0152053107
Number of pages: 408
Publisher: Graphia
Book Reviews of A Northern Light
Book Review: Beautiful, poignant, thought-provoking Young Adult historical...
Summary: 5 Stars
Having read and loved The Tea Rose, I wanted to give A Northern Light a whirl. Jennifer Donnelly has proven that she is a must-read author with both of the aforementioned books. A Northern Light is a rich historical novel about a sixteen-year-old girl's dreams and struggles set against the backdrop of the murder of Grace Brown in the year 1906. Mattie Gockey lives in a farm with her father and younger siblings. She faces many struggles and sometimes has no idea whether her family will have enough to eat the next day. She loves to read and is an aspiring writer who practices sentences using a "word of the day" dictionary. Mattie has high hopes of graduating from high school and going to college in New York City. However, there are many obstacles, including her father and her boyfriend Royal, that may well keep her from realizing her dreams. She needs the money to move to New York and begins to work at the Glenmore Hotel to help save up the money. And there is where she encounters the deceased Grace Brown and the letters the woman had made Mattie promise she'd burn before she drowned in the lake. There are various twists throughout the novel.
A Northern Light, like The Tea Rose, shows a less savory aspect of the "beautiful era" of the Edwardian period by showing the struggles of the poor and their desire to move forward in life. There are no society parties and main female characters with pretty colorful dresses and parasols looking for a rich husband here! Mattie is like Fiona in many ways, but she has her own wonderful voice as well. I enjoyed reading her views about books and literature and her desire to write stories that tell the truth about life. The characters are the most impressive part of this novel. There is so much character study here. I loved Weaver. His pain, frustration and anger are palpable and understandable. And he is a wonderful friend to Mattie. I loved their "word duels" in which they try to outdo each other with their use of big words. Miss Wilcox, Mattie's teacher, is also a fascinating character. The other characters are great, all real and flawed in many ways. This novel is darker than The Tea Rose in that this time the author does not resort to convenient plot devices to move the heroine ahead. It is a more honest approach to a rags to riches story. This novel is more of a rags to the promise of having riches one day story. There are many dark, melancholy scenes in this novel, but there are also a lot of funny ones as well. I loved the scene where Mattie and her female co-workers decide to play a prank on a perverted guest. It was hilarious and priceless! The fictional account of the murder of Grace Brown fascinated me as well. I'd heard about the famous turn of the 20th Century murder scandal and the author's note tells me a bit about what the tragic case was about. All in all, A Northern Light is a wonderful and poignant story that you will want to read. Jennifer Donnelly has impressed me once again with this fantastic offering. I highly recommend this gem.
Summary of A Northern Light
Carnegie Medal Winner, United KingdomLos Angeles Times Book Prize Winner
Borders 2004 Original Voices Award Winner
Named a Best Book of 2003 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, School Library Journal, The Irish Times, The Times (London), The Financial Times and The Albany Times-Union.
Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true. Desperate for money, she takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters. But when Grace's drowned body is fished from the lake, Mattie discovers that the letters could reveal the grim truth behind a murder.
Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Jennifer Donnelly's astonishing debut novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original.
Includes a reader's guide and an interview with the author.
It's 1906 and 16-year-old Mattie Gokey is at a crossroads in her life. She's escaped the overwhelming responsibilities of helping to run her father's brokedown farm in exchange for a paid summer job as a serving girl at a fancy hotel in the Adirondacks. She's saving as much of her salary as she can, but she's having trouble deciding how she's going to use the money at the end of the summer. Mattie's gift is for writing and she's been accepted to Barnard College in New York City, but she's held back by her sense of responsibility to her family--and by her budding romance with handsome-but-dull Royal Loomis. Royal awakens feelings in Mattie that she doesn't want to ignore, but she can't deny her passion for words and her desire to write.
At the hotel, Mattie gets caught up in the disappearance of a young couple who had gone out together in a rowboat. Mattie spoke with the young woman, Grace Brown, just before the fateful boating trip, when Grace gave her a packet of love letters and asked her to burn them. When Grace is found drowned, Mattie reads the letters and finds that she holds the key to unraveling the girl's death and her beau's mysterious disappearance. Grace Brown's story is a true one (it's the same story told in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and in the film adaptation, A Place in the Sun), and author Jennifer Donnelly masterfully interweaves the real-life story with Mattie's, making her seem even more real.
Mattie's frank voice reveals much about poverty, racism, and feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. She witnesses illness and death at a range far closer than most teens do today, and she's there when her best friend Minnie gives birth to twins. Mattie describes Minnie's harrowing labor with gut-wrenching clarity, and a visit with Minnie and the twins a few weeks later dispels any romance from the reality of young motherhood (and marriage). Overall, readers will get a taste of how bitter--and how sweet--ordinary life in the early 1900s could be. Despite the wide variety of troubles Mattie describes, the book never feels melodramatic, just heartbreakingly real. (14 and older) --Jennifer Lindsay
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