A Northern Light, by Jennifer Donnelly

My camp nostalgia spree led me to look for something Adirondack-y to read. A couple of savvy searches on LibraryThing and Amazon led me to A Northern Light, a YA novel by Jennifer Donnelly. I finished it today and I highly recommend it. It's historical fiction, the account of a 16-year-old girl named Mattie who spends her summer working at a hotel in the Adirondacks. She has been accepted to Barnard, and no one understands why she wants to go, why she wants to read instead of farm, why she has a deep love for words. She gets tied up in the death of Grace Brown, another girl who entrusts her with a packet of love letters with the instruction that she burn them. This turns out to be the same scandalous turn of the century murder case that Theodore Dreiser wrote about in An American Tragedy. I liked the way the story was told, not in flashbacks but rather in alternating chapters. We see Grace's death in the first pages, then spend time learning the events that led up to Mattie's being there at the hotel when it happened, then return to the days following her death to find out what Mattie does with the letters. It resonated with me because her final decision in the last pages was so powerful, in both an early feminist and a writerly way.

The murder of Grace Brown took place on Big Moose Lake. The fictional character of Mattie Gokey lives around the Old Forge/Inlet area, which was particularly interesting to me because I'm familiar with the Fulton chain and spent several days off there when I was working at Raquette Lake. It's the next town over.

A Northern Light reminded me of this other book which I loved but which I don't think was as popular: Grange House, by Sarah Blake. The style was quite different, as well as the heroine's background... but both took place in the same era, oddly enough, at resort hotels, and pondered the value of words and what it means to tell one's own story. The metaphysics of the story, if you will. It isn't the sort of thing that appeals to everyone, but is that rare book that is highly, highly satisfying for someone of my background (bad enough to listen to the babblings of an English major, but an English and Philosophy double major? -- Shudder). What does story mean? What do we attach to our words? Do we take a constructivist view of them (by this I mean in the philosophical sense; this word is tied to several different movements), or is the story itself something that takes on a life of its own?

Anyway. As a woman, a writer, and a native Upstate New Yorker, I loved A Northern Light.