A Northern Light

by Jennifer Donnelly

Book Overview

Now with a fresh new look and introduction, Jennifer Donnelly's astonishing, Printz Honor-winning debut--the story of a young woman's coming-of-age and the murder that rocked turn-of-the-century... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0152053107
• ISBN13: 9780152053109
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 396 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.3" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 12 to 17 years
• Grade Range: Grades 7 to 12

Customer Reviews

Wonderful book

I loved this book and will reread it soon. It is about young people trapped in very difficult circumstances who somehow find the courage to leave and become different people. The focus on words and language was thrillingly for me, an old English major. The world was very tough for women and African Americans in heartbreaking ways but the characters are able to persist despite the obstacles.

Beware: this is the British title for same book

Jennifer Donnelly's 'A Northern Light' (as it was released in the USA) is the very same book. Don't make the same mistake I did and order the UK version which is titled 'A Gathering Light' instead. Either way though, it's one of the best books I have ever read. I am not a fan of novels set in the past but this was one exception that blew my mind! Mattie is the most endearing character, and the level of mystery is just enough to keep one fully entrenched in this novel to its finale. This is a true weekend escape in novel form!

IT TAKES A VILLAGE....

Matty Gokey is the sixteen year old narrator of this novel. With the 1906 murder of Grace Brown (also covered in Dreiser's "An American Tragedy) setting the stage for this tale that ultimately explores not only Graces murder, but the issues of poverty, racism, pregnancy, the perceived station of women in society, and the effects of death/loss on the human spirit. Matty's possesses a love of words, a discerning eye, and a compulsion to write. Her hunger for more education and a life away from the rural North Woods area where she lives is weighed against her conscience and the question of whether she is obligated to fulfill two promises she made. An excellent story that interweaves Mattys story with Graces story and gives us a picture of life in an era alien to our modern one, yet brimming with characters and events we can all relate to. A definite winner!!!

don't miss this book -- but read it on the weekend!

This book is full of heart and wit. Though packed with details from a fascinating period and place, it follows a dramatic story that has contemporary resonance. In the context of a mystery story, A Northern Light captures that difficult moment in growing up when one is presented with choices that have broad consequences and no easy solutions. I found the book impossible to put down. I read it in one sitting - until two in the morning. Then I bought more copies (wanted to keep mine!) and gave them to my daughter (age 15) and my brother (age 35). Both of them found it compelling as well. I saw my daughter reading it as she walked home from school, and it was with many protests that she stopped reading long enough to finish her homework that evening. We have since had several interesting discussions about growing up, falling in love, doing the right thing, and finding the moxie to pursue a dream. Highest recommendation!

An Historical Fiction Masterpiece

This is one of those books where about a third of the way through, you anxiously thumb the remaining pages, knowing that despite your best efforts to savor it, the book will be over all too soon. When A NORTHERN LIGHT falls open, you,the reader, will fall in. Descriptions of this book by previous reviewers, while excellent and accurate, still do not prepare you for the sheer delight and pleasure of reading this story. While it has been classified as a Young Adult novel, as it does contain some language and situations, every word is absolutely true to the character who is speaking or being spoken of. I urge every teenage girl to read this, then pass it on to her mother, all of her girlfriends, aunts, a favorite teacher--in short, anyone who has a love of words, of learning, of mysteries, and a belief in the power of young women. A NORTHERN LIGHT is a most extraordinary book. Don't miss it!

Richie's Picks: A NORTHEN LIGHT

A NORTHERN LIGHT is a great coming of age story that provides serious fodder for discussing women's history in America, and which wraps itself around the sensational, true murder mystery that rocked the Adirondacks just months after San Francisco was rocked by the big quake of 1906. "The main house has four stories plus an attic. Forty rooms in all. When the hotel is fully booked, as it is this week, there are often over a hundred people in the building. All strangers to one another, coming and going. Eating and laughing and breathing and sleeping and dreaming under the same roof."They leave things behind sometimes, the guests. A bottle of scent. A crumpled handkerchief. A pearl button that fell off a dress and rolled under a bed. And sometimes they leave other sorts of things. Things you can't see. A sigh trapped in a corner. Memories tangled in the curtains. A sob fluttering against a windowpane like a bird that flew in and can't get back out. I can feel these things. They dart and crouch and whisper."I get to the bottom of the staircase and listen. The only sound is the ticking of the clock. To my right is the dining room. It's dark and empty. Straight ahead, through the porch windows, I can see the boathouse and the lake, calm and still, its black surface silvered by the moon. I pray I don't run into anyone. Not Mrs. Morrison waiting up for her husband. Or Mr. Sperry doing the accounts as he does when he can't sleep. Or, God forbid, table six lurking in a corner like some horrible spider."I walk under the antler chandelier in the foyer, and by the coat tree made of branches and deer hooves. I pass the hallway that leads to the parlor and get a fright when I see light spilling out of the room onto the hall carpet, but then I remember: That's where Grace Brown is laid out. Mrs. Morrison left a lamp burning because it's unkind to leave the dead all alone in the dark. They have darkness enough ahead of them."Our narrator is sixteen-year-old Mattie (Mathilda) Gokey, who has just snuck out of the attic where the young female employees sleep. Grace Brown is the unfortunate, young, dead woman who is about to cause a sensation. She was just discovered, along with an overturned canoe, after she and her male companion failed to return to the resort hotel for supper. Shortly before the events that befell her, Grace had slipped a packet of letters to Mattie, and had instructed her to burn them. Like Mattie doesn't have enough problems already! After her mother died and her brother split town following an altercation with their angry father, unpleasant Pa makes it clear that Mattie's priority is to help run the farm and raise her three younger sisters. But Mattie is a gifted writer and passionate scholar who is determined to earn her high school diploma and surreptitiously longs to hoard sufficient money to leave town herself--for a college education in turn of the century New York City. Her accomplice is a neighbor, a black kid named Weaver, who is also a