Mattie’s father still grieves the loss of his wife and often expresses his emotions in bursts of temper which seem particularly harsh now that the farm isn’t doing well. The brother closest in age to Mattie ran off after an altercation with their father, so there is no one left to help with much of the farmwork as well. Not only must Mattie care for her numerous younger siblings, but she also takes on the lion’s share of running the house.

However, as the eldest daughter of a widowed farmer who just barely scrapes by, Mattie’s world is constricted. With a teacher determined to help her find a place in a women’s college, Mattie chases after learning with a devotion many modern students likely would not recognize. Mattie is obviously very intelligent and not only that, she has both a respect and hunger for learning. When I said before that this book could be hard to read, I do not allude to graphic content so much as the pervasive claustrophobia that set in as I read this story. Not surprisingly, Grace’s life and dreams and all of the dreams Mattie has for her own life start to mix together in Mattie’s mind and before long, she has some major decisions to make. As Mattie deals with her feelings about Grace’s drowning and she begins to read the letters, we start to see Mattie’s recent life through flashbacks. Hotel guest Grace Brown asked Mattie to burn a packet of letters, but when Brown is later found drowned in the lake, Mattie cannot bring herself to destroy the letters.

The heroine, Mattie Gokey, works as a maid at the Glenmore, a resort at Big Moose Lake.

Set in the Adirondacks in 1906, this story is set against a famous real-life murder which also formed the backdrop for Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel, An American Tragedy. I think this haunting coming-of-age novel is more properly classified as historical fiction and while I did find it hard reading at times, I loved the story. I wasn’t quite in the mood to tackle a giant doorstopper of a book this month, so I skipped over The Tea Rose and picked up her 2003 young adult novel, A Northern Light, instead.įrom the cover blurb, I was uncertain whether to expect YA romance or historical fiction. I’ve heard good things about Jennifer Donnelly’s books over the years.

So, when prompted to pick out a book by a new-to-me author, my dilemma was something along the lines of which new-to-me author to liberate from the stack. And since I’m fairly dangerous in used bookstores, I have a massive TBR pile. The combination of cheap and “sounds intriguing” has lured me into buying many a book.

A northern light novel