A Gathering Light

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and that is good enough, really, for teen literature - get them engaged in the text, get them hungry for reading, tell them a new and interesting story and teach them some new words along the way. Beside the British Carnegie, A Northern Light won the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature.

I really liked Weaver, Mattie’s best friend and also Miss Wilcox, Mattie’s teacher who had such ambitions for her students. I loved both of them, but I really applaud Jennifer Donnelly for successfully capturing two heroines who are poles apart. Sometimes, when you catch someone unaware at just the right time and in just the right light, you can catch sight of what they will be. The author could have instead written about the fictionalised Mattie and her family and I personally would have found that to be interesting enough to hold my attention. The story that unfolds around these facts of life is sweet, poignant and real, just like Mattie herself.their critical faculties are not as honed as more experienced readers, and so the soft spots an adult reader picks up on go unnoticed by younger readers who are carried away in the power of the narrative voice and the excitement of "what will happen next".

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. Grace is another young lady whose body is found lifeless in the lake by the Glenmore Hotel, where Mattie works. The tyranny of the powerful and influential where subservience, the norm in so many relationships whether marriage, employer/employee, tenant farmer and owner, results in dreams having to be curtailed. Mattie's sisters are another reason why Mattie is torn between going to New York and staying to look after them. my good bookshelf “What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.Especially since I often go through the same dilemma, even in this day and age, thanks to the backward society I'm from. When Weaver's mother is attacked near the end of the novel, however, Emmie reforms and repays her kindness by taking care of her. However, I think the one negative aspect for me with regards to the book itself is that there didn’t actually seem to be very much focus on the crime itself- which was not what I had expected at all. She also loves books and in their small town, the only source of a local library comes in the form of a resident’s ramshackle pickle boat. Mattie, however, yearns to attend college, despite the fact that her mother recently died and her father needs her help on their farm.

In 2014, Jennifer teamed up with Disney to launch the bestselling Waterfire Saga, an epic series about six mermaids on a quest to rid the world of an ancient evil. What seemed the most important to me was following one’s dreams, having the fortitude to believe they can come true even under the most disheartening set backs. And, as she reads, a riveting story emerges - not only Grace Brown's story but also Mattie's hopes and ambitions for the future and her relationships with her friends and family. 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. Mattie doesn’t need Grace’s sad little tale to let her know that all men are bastards and there’s nobody you can rely on except No 1.On July 12, 1906, the body of a young woman named Grace Brown was pulled from the waters of Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains.

It is also into this story that the body of a female guest at the hotel where Mattie works is found and this becomes one of the many threads of the book. As a result, Emmie's home situation improves and her children begin to help with the farming, being unable to previously due to Emmie's frequently unstable moods. The author of A Northern Light frequently conjured works of worthy literature as though she was trying to snare the reader into believing her book was similarly worthy, it wasn't.

It was as if the true-life events had been used as a springboard merely to tell Mattie’s story, which whilst fair enough, I am left questioning really what was the point in writing about Grace and her death in the first place. After all, she had promised her dying mother she would never leave and she had a duty to help her pa with the chores and with raising her younger sisters. The Hook - When I worked in the library I often recommended A Northern Light to older young adults or even adults looking for a good historical fiction book. I don't know why I should care what happens to people in a drawing room in London or Paris or anywhere else when no one in those places cares what happens to people in Eagle Bay. What is wonderful about these characters is that they are not just props, they have their own conflicts and their own fears that Donnelly explores through the eyes of Mattie.