Title: “A Northern Light”

Author: Jennifer Donnelly

Pages: 396

The setting of this young-adult novel is northern New York state in 1906. Jennifer Donnelly meticulously researched the time and place, which resulted in a realistic and vivid tale.

The author says, “I consulted oral histories, histories of the area written by local residents, tax records, photographs, newspaper clippings, a Cranberry Lake farmwife’s diary, court transcripts of Chester Gillette’s trial, old camp menus, old postcards and autograph books ... I also used stories told to me by my great-grandmother, my grandmother, her brother and sister, my father and my uncle.”

Weaving this all together with her own imagination, Donnelly has created historical fiction that is hard to put down.

The protagonist, Mattie Gokey, is 16 as the story begins. Not long before, her mother died of cholera, causing a cloud of doubt to gather over Mattie’s plans to attend a college in New York City. She manages to attend the local school where she and her best friend, Weaver, a young black man, do independent studies in high school subjects with the elementary teacher.

Both of these unlikely students come from one-parent homes where money is scarce. Both pass their college entrance tests and are hoping to leave for New York City to study.  

Miss Wilcox, Mattie and Weaver’s teacher, sees the talent in both of these young adults and tries to influence them to develop their potential. The author is adept at painting scenes that could be extracted from the real lives of young women and blacks in 1906. It seems that the economic conditions of their families and the expectations of family and the community pose almost insurmountable barriers.

Not only does Mattie’s family mourn for the loss of their mother, they miss their estranged older brother, as well. The four girls remain at home with their dad struggling to eke a living out of their small farm.

When their mule dies, Mattie finally persuades her father to let her go to work at a local hotel, where she works in the kitchen, as a waitress and as a maid.

One day a beautiful, young guest at the hotel asks Mattie to burn a packet of letters. While she intends to do so, Mattie gets too busy with her job to carry out the request. Later in the day, she learns that the young woman has drowned in the nearby lake and her companion is missing. Mattie reads the letters that evening and realizes that the young woman probably has been murdered.

The author has cleverly included this real-life murder from 1906 in her novel by having the victim speak to the protagonist just before going on the boating trip.

For me, the real mystery in the story is not the murder, but what Mattie will do with her life. Being a bookish girl who loves words and books, she is an unlikely choice of girlfriends for Royal Loomis.

Yet they began “sparking,” as the author puts it. Mattie likes how she feels noticed when she is with Royal, who is a handsome young man. She likes the feeling of danger in being physically attracted to someone. And she likes the feeling of safety when Royal makes all the decisions and she doesn’t have to be the strong one.

On the other hand, Royal doesn’t understand words and books. He thinks her incessant appetite for new words is a waste of time. He wonders if her life is so bad that she has to make friends with the characters in books. He wonders why she wants to have more education.

The author slips in for us how people of that time feel about education for women, teachers, racism, pregnancy, their communities, outsiders and more. To me, these attitudes seem very authentic and lingered even much later in our country’s history.

While this coming-of-age story is written for young adults, I defy adults to pick it up and see if it is not a book that will give them second thoughts.

(Rita Greff grew up the oldest of eight children in a family that valued reading, particularly fiction. She taught fifth and sixth grades for 34 years.)