A Northern Light

by Jennifer Donnelly

On July 12, 1906, in the first chapter of this page-turner, a woman is found drowned near the posh Glenmore Hotel on Big Moose Lake in upstate New York. Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey, an employee at Glenmore, “feels like there are iron bands around [her] chest” because earlier that day the victim, Grace Brown, had given Mattie a bundle of letters to burn. And the name on the letters does not match the name under which Ms. Brown’s beau had registered. Jennifer Donnelly takes an actual murder, the Gillette case (which also inspired Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy), and creates a parallel between many of the issues that faced Grace Brown and those confronting Mattie. They live in a time when everyone’s path seems mapped out for him or her, especially for women. Mattie’s friend Weaver and her teacher, Miss Wilcox, encourage the teen’s gift for writing (“ever since, because of the two of them, Weaver and Miss Wilcox both, I am wanting things I have no business wanting, and what they call a gift seems to me more like a burden”). With her father newly widowed, and as the oldest of four daughters a younger brother, an older brother who’d skipped out on the family after a fight with Pa, and a 60-acre farm to tend, Mattie sees no way out. Until she gets an acceptance to Barnard College. But will her father let her go? The story line alternates between the investigation of Ms. Brown’s death in the present, and flashbacks to Mattie’s life on her family’s farm. The murder mystery at this novel’s center causes Mattie to rethink her own future, and whether or not she will take matters into her own hands holds the greatest suspense of all.