A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Set during the early part of the twentieth century, A Northern Light features Mattie Gokey, a bright sixteen-year-old-girl trying to balance her education with caring for her four sisters and father after the death of her mother. Her older brother Lawton has also left the family and Mattie struggles with taking care of the house and feeding everyone, particularly during a difficult Northeast winter.

While incorporating some of the events surrounding the death of Grace Brown—the inspiration for the Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, as the book’s cover points out—the story remains focused on Mattie’s coming of age and her relationship with her teacher Miss Wilcox. Author Jennifer Donnelly does a tremendous job of illustrating the period, giving a sense of the family’s desperation and determination to succeed in spite of the elements. Mattie represents a glimpse of the challenges faced by young “independent” women, including the difficult decision of whether to continue schooling or to get married to Royal Loomis; the fact that she cannot choose both is a sure sign of the times.

How historically accurate is this book? The sensational case of Chester Gillette has been documented in Adirondack Tragedy: The Chester Gillette Murder Case of 1906 by Joseph W. Brownell and Patricia W. Enos, among other accounts, and proved to be one of the first “trials of the century.” Grace Brown was pregnant as the time of her death, and the letters that were given to Mattie in A Northern Light were based on the actual letters between Grace and Chester. Donnelly has placed Mattie at the Glenmore hotel, where Grace and Chester were staying Grace was found dead.

The book does not center on the tragedy described above. Rather, we see the efforts Mattie makes with her studies and the difficulty her father has in letting her go to work at the hotel. Mattie needed to work in order to earn money for her train ticket to New York, but her father wanted her to continue her role as mother to her sisters. Nothing is clear-cut about her decision to leave her family—Mattie likes Royal Loomis very much, but she knows that if she passes up the opportunity to go to Barnard College, she will never again have another chance.


Though there are times when the story drags a little, the richness of the characters and color of the period do keep us interested in Mattie’s plight. Her sisters, particularly Lou and Beth, are a riot, and the dialogue is snappy and endearing. Donnelly also uses an interesting device in a having a single word serve as the heading for each chapter, representing Mattie’s quest to learn a new word each day. We read along, curious to learn how the word represents that particular chapter.

This novel would appeal to junior high school and early high school students, especially those who enjoyed Little Women. It would be a prime selection for independent reading, though I could see it potentially being used in a local history class in Upstate New York. Donnelly includes notes after the book to clarify which factual elements she chose to use artistic license. For example, she writes that the letters given to Mattie by Grace Brown included all of the correspondence between Grace and Chester, but that in reality, only the letters Grace received from Chester Gillette were recovered at the hotel; her letters to Chester were found in his room when he was arrested for her murder. The historic roots of the story give it a little more credence, helping to establish the period for the young reader. That Mattie and her family are fictional does not take away from the fact that they are still representative of the period. The important thing when considering historic fiction is that the truth doesn’t betray itself. If the reader can detect blatantly false items that disrupt the historic continuity or the continuity of the story, then she will no longer be able to yield to that “suspense of disbelief” that characterizes a good story no matter the medium.



View all my reviews