A Northern Light - Softcover

Donnelly, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0152053107 ISBN 13: 9780152053109

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004

Synopsis

Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has a word for everything, and big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true. 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.

Desperate for money, she takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters. But when Grace's drowned body is fished from Big Moose Lake, Mattie discovers that the letters could reveal the grim truth behind a murder.Set in 1906 in the Adirondack Mountains, against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, this Printz Honor-winning coming-of-age novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original.

About this title

Review:

A 2011 ALA Popular Paperbacks Title

"Jennifer Donnelly has populated her first young-adult novel with a community of distinctive characters who ring rich and true."
--New York Times Book Review (09/21/2003)

From the Publisher:

'A Gathering Light is a remarkable debut, a book that sweeps across the genre boundaries of murder, mystery, romance, and historical fiction - resulting in an original novel that is both gripping and touching.' SCOTT TUROW

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0152053107
• ISBN 13: 9780152053109
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 396