"A Northern Light" by Jennifer Donnelly

"A Northern Light" is a historical fiction novel about a young girl, Mattie Gokey who possess a gift for writing, a love for books, and an ambitious hope to go to college. The story is set in a small town in the Adirondacks in 1906. Mattie is poor, motherless, and is the daughter of a farmer. She longs to leave the small town, to be free and independent, but is stuck feeling obligated to stay with her father and family due to a promise made to her dying mother, and a new relationship with a neighboring boy who doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate Mattie's joy of the written word. Intertwined with this is the story of letters left in Mattie’s care by Grace Brown, a guest of the hotel at which Mattie works, shortly before Grace’s body is discovered, drowned in the lake. Grace Brown’s tragic tale may sound familiar, because it is the true story told in Theodore Drieser’s "An American Tragedy."

At first, when reading reviews about this book by others and even on the back cover, you get the sense that this is a murder mystery story. But, after diving into this book, I soon realized that my first interpretation of what the novel would consist of was not correct. The book does include some letters from Grace Brown, a guest of the hotel where main character, Mattie, works but, the letters are so sparsely interspersed throughout the novel that there's not a whole lot of "mystery" or "suspense" in the story at all. Instead you're left wanting to know even more about the murder aspect that you end up resenting the rest of the story.

While the story is well told in the respect that it is wonderfully written, gives a realistic and imaginable depiction of what life was like during the turn of a century (from the types of chores one had to complete to the sexist expectations for a woman to take care of her family), nothing else about it really grabbed me. My biggest critique of the novel as a whole is that I wish it would have been focused more around Grace's story, or at least in equal proportion to Mattie's, and less about Mattie finding her way into the world as an aspiring writer/academic, supported by teacher, Mrs. Wilcox.

I think this book is definately worth reading at some point in your life, I would not say that this book is deserving of the awards in which it has received such as the Carnegie Medal, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Michael L. Printz Award Honor.

The one plus I give this book is its success in sharing with its audience different aspects of racism, sexism, poverty, and finding your way in the world around you.