A Gathering Light

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Especially since I often go through the same dilemma, even in this day and age, thanks to the backward society I'm from. And it's not just this: Mattie yearning to be both an educated woman and eventually an author, as well as have a family and a loving husband.

In an attempt to raise the money, Mattie cleans her rich Aunt Josie's house every week, but Aunt Josie refuses to pay her and tells Mattie she is selfish to leave the farm and the family. Some of the characters seem less well drawn than others and some of the plot movements are contrived and awkward but it is an enthralling read. A Northern Light is an interesting blend of historical fiction, murder mystery, and commentary on sex, race, and social status at the beginning of the 20th century, but mainly this story is feminist at its core (but not in an "in-your-face"/bra-burning way). Mattie makes the incredibly difficult choice to leave the North Woods and go to school in New York City.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 pattern in which oppression and repression intermingle with ambition and vision. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy endings and all that. It's also a time where many female authors were considered scandalous and their books, if you could get them, needed to be hidden. Jennifer Donnelly is now one of my all-time fave authors, and her novel Revolution also definitely deserves to be read.

Jennifer Donnelly is the author of thirteen novels - Poisoned, Stepsister, Beauty and the Beast: Lost in a Book, These Shallow Graves, Sea Spell, Dark Tide, Rogue Wave, Deep Blue, Revolution, A Northern Light, The Tea Rose, The Winter Rose and The Wild Rose - and Humble Pie, a picture book for children. Jennifer Donnelly is the author of thirteen novels - Poisoned, Stepsister, Lost in a Book, These Shallow Graves, Sea Spell, Dark Tide, Rogue Wave, Deep Blue, Revolution, A Northern Light, The Tea Rose, The Winter Rose and The Wild Rose - and Humble Pie, a picture book for children. Although I've probably read at least two books and three novellas since I set this story down, it has still been in the forefront of my thoughts. In a series of parallels we get Grace and her rich lover, ‘Miss Wilcox’ the disguised poet and her rich husband and Mattie with the boy next door. It’s well written… except all the self-conscious references to words and writing (capital Ws needed, I think) are getting on my nerves.Each day she learns a new word and with Weaver,her friend, she plays a wonderfully simple game in which they do battle firing associated words back and forth. Prior to having read A Northern Light, the only Donnelly novel I'd read was Revolution, which made me sit up till 3 AM wracked with sobs while I finished the book. Mattie's whole shtick with words was kind of twee and I found myself rolling my eyes at it more often than not.

Her dilemmas and choices are quietly reflected in the life of a young woman found drowned in a lake, a woman that Mattie only gets to know through reading her letters. Now Mattie’s witnessed all the pain and blood of a childbirth, and complains about how nothing she’s read has prepared her for it: ‘not one of them tells the truth about babies. i don't mean this to be disparaging (observe how i have grown in my teen fiction stance), but younger readers lack the literary scope of people who have been around the block a few times with a few books.this was in response, not to this book, but to marcelo in the real world, when i remarked that it would sell quite easily to an adult audience, so i wondered why it was being marketed at teen fiction. It follows Cinderella's wicked stepsister Isabelle as personifications of fate and chance battle for control of her life, hinting that there may be hope after all for a girl labeled "ugly" since her first appearances in literature. But Mattie 's widowed father, her little sisters, and her first love all question why Mattie wouldn't just be content to do her duty to her family. If Donnelly lets her readers off the hook with this one – if Royal Doulton, or whatever his name is, fails to jam one in or even to try – I’ll be disappointed.