Book Jacket:
Mattie Gokey has a word for everything. She collects words, stores them up as a way of fending off the hard truths of her life, the truths that she can’t write down in stories.
The fresh pain of her mother’s death. The burden of raising her sisters while her father struggles over his brokeback farm. The mad welter of feelings Mattie has for handsome but dull Royal Loomis, who says he wants to marry her. And the secret dreams that keep her going–visions of finishing high school, going to college in New York City, becoming a writer.
Yet when the drowned body of a young woman turns up at the hotel where Mattie works, all her words are useless. But in the dead woman’s letters, Mattie again finds her voice, and a determination to live her own life.
Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, this coming-of-age novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original.
You can read an excerpt here.
Review:
With all the buzz surrounding Jennifer Donnelly’s latest, Revolution, I figured it was high time I read her earlier – and much lauded – book, A Northern Light. And in doing so, I discovered a book that equally dazzled and frustrated me.
No one can doubt the quality of Donnelly’s writing. Her use of language and nuanced character work is deft and lovely. Mattie’s daily word from the dictionary is a clever literary device for understanding Mattie’s love of words and creative mind, and it throws her life of drudgery into stark relief – like watching a prize Thoroughbred being hitched to a plow. Mattie’s talent, her struggle to understand both the literary world and her real one and the differences between the two, and the constant hardships of her time and place, combine to make a fascinating portrait of a teenage girl. It’s impossible not to feel for Mattie as she is forced to reconcile what people tell her she should do and want, with what she actually wants – and at its heart I think this is a dilemma that it timeless. Being torn between family expectations and selfish desire, between what she should want and what she does want, between dreams and financial realities, is a heart-rending situation, but especially so for Mattie, whose choices in life are so limited.
The people who populate Mattie’s minuscule town are complete, flawed, and fascinating characters, each and every one. From the selfishness of an Aunt who has the money but won’t pay Mattie for cleaning her home, even knowing how desperately Mattie needs the money, to Mattie’s father, whose unyielding ways drive his children away, to Mattie’s carefree friend who discovers the hard realities of marriage and children, even though she loves the man she married. However I did find the teacher character a little hard to swallow – not that she wan’t well drawn and interesting, it’s just the coincidence of a lauded writer who just happens to end up teaching Mattie in her particular tiny backwater of a town stuck in my craw, so to speak.
I have two great frustrations with this story, and the first is the way Mattie lies to herself throughout the entire book. It’s a testament to Donnelly’s skill that she was able to make clear to the reader what Mattie really wanted, despite Mattie’s unreliable narration and constantly changing mind. Mattie is very good at not thinking about things, and at “convincing” herself of something she doesn’t really believe – but as the reader, I always saw Mattie’s false convictions for exactly what they were, and I became increasingly frustrated with her dishonesty with herself. It did create a sense of tension, with the question of whether or not Mattie would ever admit the truth to herself, but her dishonesty also alienated me from her character. It’s not that she was changing her mind constantly, it’s that it was all such a transparent evasion – and part of what she was avoiding was the meat of her story, particularly the dilemma created by her promise to her dying mother. I really wanted to see her deal with that, instead of watch her avoid it the entire book (and the ending kind of glossed over her answer to that dilemma in an unsatisfactory manner). I would have minded less if Mattie admitted to herself what she really wanted and then tried to come to terms with not being able to get it, with searching for a different kind of happiness, but instead all we get is a girl lying to herself for the vast majority of the book.
However, interspersed within Mattie’s constant evasions were some fascinating moments of insight, especially surrounding her first relationship. Mattie’s conflicted thinking about the choice between a family and a career, and about what she wants as a woman, lead to wonderful moments where we get to watch her grow. Donnelly touched on so many issues – status, personality, children – that she imbued Mattie’s first romance with a refreshing complexity, a wonderful change of pace from the insta-love we see far too often in YA.
My second great source of frustration with this story is the anticlimactic nature of the plot, particularly the murder. There was no mystery to this book; the murder was obvious from the beginning, and the process of Mattie coming to terms with it was agonizingly – and quite frankly, artificially – slow. The letters themselves were a fascinating portrait of a life gone too soon, but the way Donnelly played with the narrative timeline, jumping back and forth between the present aftermath of the murder and Mattie’s backstory, was essentially artifice – it tried to create a sense of suspense, but in the end it didn’t amount to anything. And while I appreciate the historical tie-in, the causative nature of the letters on Mattie’s big decision felt contrived to me. Rather than giving Mattie the tools to make up her own mind, the letters just made it up for her – it was a terribly convenient external push, much like the conveniently gifted teacher – and it flatlined Mattie’s character arc. The whole book was leading up to Mattie’s final decision, but in the end that decision wasn’t even her own – she’s reacting instead of acting, running away from something instead of deciding to take that step forward on her own. Honestly, I felt cheated.
And then I read the afterword, where Donnelly explains the fascinating history that takes place after the murder, with the sensational nature of the murder trial, and I felt cheated all over again. The history is actually more interesting, on its own, than in its watered down inclusion in this story. In this book the history is subserviant to Mattie’s story – but ironically, Mattie’s story is constructed to hinge entirely on the history, such that both end up flat due to the other. And so I can’t help but feel that the sum of this book was far less than its parts.
So while this book is a wonderful portrait of a period in history, and a well written character study, in the end I feel the same way about A Northern Light as I do about the movie Citizen Kane – I respect it, I recognize the quality, but I have no desire to see it again.
Byrt Grade: Conflicted. On the quality of writing and characterizations, A, but as a story arc, B+
As Levar Burton used to say – you don’t have to take my word for it…
A Northern Light won the Carnegie Medal, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Michael L. Printz Award Honor – and all these accolades are well deserved. I loved A Northern Light, and wholeheartedly recommend it to readers of all ages and of all genres. This is a beautifully told story about a young woman’s journey of self discovery amidst racism, sexism, and poverty, and a book not to be missed.
And, while it was well-told – Mattie was a believable narrator with a strong voice, and the details about rural Adirondack living at the turn of the century were obviously well-researched and vividly drawn – there wasn’t that much about the story itself that really grabbed me. Yes, life was hard for young women. Yes, it’s a struggle to become the person you want to be in spite of your circumstances. Yes, feminism is great, and we should be grateful that we don’t have to fight the same battles as Mattie (or Grace). But, although Grace Brown’s letters were the inspiration for the book, I didn’t really buy them as a catalyst, and without the element of the “murder mystery”, this becomes no different from bunches of other “oppressed young women” historical fiction out there. It’s well told, but didn’t really ever grab me as something special.
I liked that nothing came easy for (Mattie). She had to work for what she wanted and there were often enormous obstacles in her way. That she was able to overcome all of the bad stuff that was thrown her way was inspirational and heart-breaking at the same time. Jennifer Donnelly knows how to pull the readers’ heart strings in all the right ways.
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