YA Review: A Northern Light

Donnelly, J. (2003). A Northern Light. New York: Harcourt Children's Books.

It is 1906 in the rural North Woods of Upstate New York and sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has aspirations. She wants to earn a high school diploma, go to Barnard College in New York City and become a writer. But her mother died of cancer and she is desperately needed at home to help her Pa with the farm and her three younger sisters. Before she died, her mother wrested a promise out of Mattie to stay home and take care of her siblings and she wonders if she has to keep that promise.

I enjoyed that this was no simple linear tale. In fact, because A Northern Light jumps back and forth in time it creates a feeling of suspense, especially around the mysterious death of Grace Brown. I enjoyed how gritty and raucous a story this is, filled with the overlapping voices of each character. There are so many wild and crazy characters that come and go throughout A Northern Light and flesh out the story. Mattie cares about all of these unique characters in this rural North Woods community and through her eyes we come to care deeply about them too. Told in Mattie’s truthful, young storyteller’s voice, this is a no-holds-barred sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal look at life in the back woods at the turn of the 20th century.

For me, one of Mattie's most endearing traits is her profound affection for words and language. In her own storytelling, Mattie is careful to capture the rhythm of the vernacular. Mattie has strong opinions about how writing should reveal truths and not paint what she considers silly, fairytale dream worlds. Everyday Mattie chooses a word from her dictionary as the word of the day – a device the author uses to signal when a chapter is a flashback. Mattie reveals so much of herself in this daily ritual, her passions and her joys and her tenacious love of the written word. “’Isn’t that just perfect?’ I said. ‘Fractious. I repeated, relishing the bite of the f, teeth against lip. A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.’” (p.15)

I was particularly struck by how many depictions of women at every stage of life there are in this book. Each woman included in the story is making a choice about how she is going to live her life. Mattie lets us into her head as she studies each one of these women; as she notices the joy and the heartbreak that their choices have brought them. Even though her days are filled with hard physical labor from dawn to dusk, Mattie is always thinking and grappling with the choices set before her. There are no happy endings, no neatly tied up plots and “happily ever after” in the stories Mattie writes. Likewise, there are no simple solutions in the lives Mattie witnesses in her rural community. So many people in her life have plans for Mattie, her Pa, her handsome boyfriend Royal, her best friend Weaver and her brilliant teacher Miss Wilcox; so many people pushing and pulling her in every direction. In the end Mattie is the only one who can make the choice about how she should live her own life.