Last year, I used to go every day to the library of the bank where my dad works at (ain't that a mouthful or what?!)—I was homeschooled, and it was the perfect place to study for upcomin’ exams. There I stumbled upon a Reader’s Digest Condensed Version book, which basically features up to 4 abridged books in one volume, and one of the novels it featured was A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly (which I later found out was called A Northern Light in the states). Since I am the queen of procrast More...

this monday-morning float is for you, alfonso!

oh, a northern light, you were way better than i expected. i used to get really angry at this book, because it would come up in resort all the time and some people would just shelve it in my section because it looks like a grown-up book, not like teen fiction, and i would always have to be yanking it off the shelves and saying "nooooo, you go downstairs!!" like shooing away a mischievous dog.

while i was reading it, i loved it.

a few days after, i am More...

I don’t quite understand why this book hasn’t caught my attention earlier. It is excellently written, features a strong and likable heroine and perfectly captures her hopes and fears in an era so different to our own. It touches on a lot of issues – racial injustice, the situation of women at the beginning of the 20th century, poverty and family ties – and it does so in a very realistic way. It doesn’t look at things through rose-coloured glasses, and it certainly doesn’t offer an ending with a More...

Grace drowned in Big Moose Lake betrayed by love. Mattie drowning in responsibility and weighed down by her sense of duty and others' expectations. Weaver choking on prejudice and small mindedness. Emily fighting to break the surface of her own stifling marriage. Using the framework of the drowning of a young woman in 1906 Jennifer Donnelly gathers up the threads and images present in a poor close knit farming community in the Adirondacks and uses it like a loom to weave together a complex patte More...

“I had looked around. I’d seen all the things she’d spoken of and more besides. I’d seen a bear cub lift its face to the drenching spring rains. And the silver moon of winter, so high and blinding. I’d seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maple in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. I’d seen them and loved them. But I’d also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pi More...

It wasn't until the very end of this book that I realised exactly how much I loved it. I am unsure if I would call it enjoyable, more like a very well written, intelligent and absorbing read rather than something I would call uplifting. It's definitely haunting, and definitely something everyone should read.

Lyrical. Captivating. Haunting.

All the different facets of this novel add up to make one of the best stories I have ever read. From the very first page, Mattie Gokey's zeal for words makes the pages of the book turn themselves. Weaved throughout Maggie's fictional struggles is the real life story of the death of Grace Brown, as seen through Mattie's brief (and fictional, of course) interaction with her, and letters that she left behind (the letters are real, by the way).

This is not an idyllic co More...

I love books about booklovers. I love the feeling of connection that I have with people who appreciate books and words the same way that I do. I felt this especially with Mattie, because she loves words and language and writing, but doesn't know exactly how to use those words... they are just built up inside her, preparing her for when she will be able to express herself.

When I started this book, I wasn't sure if I would Love it (with a capital "L") as some of my friends here Loved it. It is ve More...

This is one of my favourite books I have read. It is brilliantly written and the characters so real and truthful.

A Gathering Light, or A Northern Light is based on the real life case of Grace Brown and the letters of her you read within this book are her actual letters.

Around the story of Grace Brown, is the story of Mattie who is one of the most real, memorable characters written I have come across. I love Mattie, she feels real to me and it is as if I really know her. A feeling I am sure she More...

This isn't my normal fare and I'm not entirely sure how it ended up on the bookshelf! However for bedtime reading I'm willing to try pretty much anything. This is a coming of age story set in early twentieth century America in New York state in a rural farming community. The author has quite neatly woven the story around an actual historical event; the murder of a young woman called Grace Brown (also the basis of Dreiser's An American Tragedy).
The story revolves around Mattie, who is 16, her fa More...

An excellent YA novel. It didn't make me bawl my eyes out however, therefore only 4 stars.

Set in 1906, the book follows an important period in a 16-year old girl's life, when she faces the dilemma of what her future will be. Mattie is an aspiring writer and yearns to attend university, but her family responsibilities hinder her dreams. Will she choose to risk it all and try to find her own independence or will she succumb to her family's wishes and abandon her aspirations to instead become a fa More...

This book is a delightful read full of thoughtful and realistic characters. The setting is loosely based on the murder of a women in Upstate New York that also inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The main story revolves around a young girl who desperately wants to go to college and whose family is desperately poor. The story creates a vivid portrait of rural life in the Adirondacks and the sharp distinction of pursuing your dreams and being loyal to your family and sometimes having More...

Mattie Gokey dreams of a life where she is not bound by the confines of her small Catskills town. This beautifully worded historical fiction novel explores feminism, education, familial duty and the crossroads between being a girl and a woman.
Read the rest of my review here

I hated to be away from this book and I was sad to finish it. Mattie is an enchanting character and the story is all the stuff Little House by Laura Ingalls Wilder doesn't mention. The terror of watching a woman you love have a difficult birth, the disgusting things that happen to those with grippe, the pain of losing a mother to an illness.

I was set to giving this book a three-star rating when I happened to read on the Author's Note part that the characters of Grace Brown and Chester Gillette, as well as the facts of Grace's murder in the Adirondacks and the fishing out of her body from the waters of the Big Moose Lake, are actually real people and events. Thus, although the book's main protagonist, Mattie Gokey, was fictional, the novel was actually constructed upon and based on history.

And I have a certain penchant for historic More...

I have mixed feelings about this book. Parts were written well; other parts were more of a stretch. Some of the events were extremely predictable; others were a total surprise. Some events and characters seem to have no point in the overall plot, and others that have a greater role in the plot hardly appear at all. Having taken a number of creative writing classes, I know these things to be things most writers avoid. I wouldn’t call this great writing. It is overall an engaging book, but not gre More...

I can’t even begin to summarize this book. It’s so complex, but I’ll try my best.

It’s 1906 and Mattie Gokey wants to go to college in New York City. There’s only one problem- she’s a girl. Mattie works at the hotel, and Grace Brown gives her a packet of letters to burn. Mattie forgets, and the next day Grace’s body is found drowned at the bottom of the pond.

The story alternates between the present and the future until they meet up. I found this book very intriguing, though I must warn that ther More...

A co-worker of mine had been telling me to read this book for years, but I kept putting it off, thinking it didn't look all that interesting. I finally picked it up, and just couldn't stop reading it! The narration style is very powerful, told from the point of view of a young girl that is trying to make a decision between staying on her family's farm like she promised her mother she would, or to go to New York City to go to college.

At the same time, she is also reading the letters of Grace Brow More...

"I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you."

I've often wondered about what goes on in the lives surrounding a horrific tragedy. We get to know the victims story so very well through the newspaper and court records. What we don't know is what was it really like in that time period, era, location.

Jennifer Donnelly transported me to 1906 to the "North Woods" into the lives of the people and the reality they are faced with and t More...

Sometimes there are books that draw you in so completely to the story and the characters you don't want to let go. This was one of those reads. I loved this book.

A Northern Light is a richly layered character driven novel that is a joy to read. The great thing about Jennifer Donnelly is that I never felt she bogged down in the details as some writers do, especially when it comes to historical fiction. I would give this one to readers who might shy away from that genre because Mattie and her sto More...

A Northern Light, in my humble opinion, is one of those rare books that make you happy to be able to read and appreciate realistic if occasionally heartbreaking character growth. Mattie has to be one of the best contemporary YA female protagonists I've come across in a while, partly because, being set in 1906, women's rights are miles behind what it is today, but she's just generally someone I could empathise with.

I thought this particular quote really struck home:

"Well, it seems to me that the

More...

Top notch YA literature, just as fast to read as the best action-packed stories, but with richly layered subplots and themes and skillful, graceful writing.

I am very, very impressed. This is a book I could easily re-read a dozen times and still find new wonderful things inside of it.

Set in 1906 in the Adirondack Mountains of New York, the story is billed on the back cover as a murder mystery: 17 year old Mattie works at the resort hotel where a girl just a year older than herself is found dead More...

Original post at One More Page

I was never a big fan of historical novels because in my mind, they're equivalent to classics: slow reading and oftentimes, hard to read. I tend to shy away from any novel set in any part of history that isn't a classic because...well, classics are classics for a reason that's why I feel the need to read them. Historicals are just that, and it doesn't really call my name.

That's just me being a book snob, excuse me there.

But the good reviews of Jennifer Donnelly's bo More...

A timeless comeing of age story set in the early 1900's told thru Matie Gokey who at 16 years old, is a promising young writter with an independent heart and a love for books, who with help of a teacher with new ideas unwelcome in that day and age, sees a spark in Mattie to push her to apply herself. She is given a opportunity to accept a scholarship to Barnard college or stay in the North woods and marry a handsome farmer with his own dreams.
The true love letters of the 1906 Grace Brown murder More...

[I would consider this one book that I should have given a review on ages ago:]


Nothing reaches historical fiction reader's hearts more drastically than a woman who is locked up inside a world she no longer feels she is a part of. A Northern Light is a perfect example of that type of plight, and an award-winning example at that. Mattie Gokey (I love that last name, it's like a cross between a poky cheese and an alpaca) is tangled up in her feelings for Royal, a handsome but utterly boring guy. H More...

"A Gathering Light" is the title of this book in the United Kingdom, but here in North America it is titled "A Northern Light" why the change of title, I have no idea.

I enjoyed this book, it would definitely appeal to fans of "The Word of the Day", and the book's heroine is a word collector named Mattie Gokey.

Mattie Gokey's mother has died from cancer and Mattie is burdened with the chore of raising her sisters while her father struggles to put food on the table. Royal Loomis a good looking neig More...

I rate one star not because "I didn't like it" but because there is a nauseating amount of this genre book in existence. The genre of a bookish, misunderstood girl who fights against the strictures of society so that she can be a liberated woman. The genre of book where the author tries to set the world straight on what a girl should do with her life and how she should be treated. The most galling is that the author writes the protagonist (Mattie) as disliking books with "happy endings" but then More...

The year is 1906. Mattie Gokey is only sixteen years old. She is fascinated by books and words and desperately wants to go to college. She has the brains, but not the means. Her family has been struggling financially ever since the death of her mother. Mattie feels that she’ll be trapped in Eagle Bay until an interesting set of circumstances permits her to take a job at the Glenmore Hotel. With this opportunity, Mattie plans to save up as much money as she can so that she can make it to college. More...