A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

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After reading The Book Thief, I was taken aback by the power of books and language. To my extreme gratification, A Northern Light was equally invested in the incredible potential of the written and spoken word. Donnelly’s book is beautifully written and important. Her playfulness with language, her ability to switch from past to present smoothly, in addition to her feminist twinge made this book an awesome, enlightening read.

To be honest, I have never been one for historical fiction mainly because I cannot stand the ways in which people (particularly women and people of color) have been historically marginalized. This is not to say that this has been resolved, but it is just more evident and shocking in early twentieth century texts. This book was a great experience for me personally because it showed me the injustices I feared, but fought against them. The fact that Mattie is the first in her family to get her high school diploma, her best friend is not only male, but African-American, and that she has a job outside of the home to support her family are all elements of a story from 1906 that I did not expect.

I loved seeing 16-year-old Mattie go through all of the typical teenage trials and tribulations, but in an entirely different setting. She argues with her siblings, fights with her father, hates her name, falls in love, experiences the tug of sexual desire and doesn’t know what to do with it (who does?), and plays made up games and a secret language with her best friend. Like any teenage female, Mattie compares herself to other girls: “Belinda is a pretty name. It feels like meringue in your mouth or a curl of sugar on snow. Not like Matt. Matt is the sound of knots in a dog’s coat or something you wipe your feet on” (51). She becomes giddy with emotion when Royal kisses her, but fears she will lose her independence or intelligence: “Can a girl be unmanned? I wondered. By a boy? Can she be unbrained? (78). One element of the story that I felt was incredibly different from most teenagers experiences in modern day, was the compulsion Mattie felt to support her family’s dreams, rather than her own. This pull between family and independence was incredibly powerful and really made me think about what I would do in the same situation. For Mattie, is a matter of love versus language, love being marriage and family—her expected role, and language being following her dreams of going to Barnard to study and write literature. “I wondered if all those things were the best things to have or if it was better to have words and stories…Nobody I knew had both” (96-97).

The way the book is structured with alternating chapters focusing on Mattie’s story and Grace’s, we can see the way in which the latter affects the former. While she is falling in love with books and boys, she is also reading the story of a woman who gives her entire self to her man, only to be left completely alone and eventually killed. This affects the way Mattie views relationships and allows her to see that things are not always as they seem: sometimes people will use and abuse you for their own benefit, without caring at all. Understanding this allows her the courage to break off the engagement to Royal, whom she has realized is using her to gain land on her father’s property.

Both of these plot lines allow Mattie to continually develop her love of reading and her passion for the story: “There were lives in those books, and deaths. Families and friends and lovers and enemies. Joy and despair, jealousy, envy, madness, and rage…I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out” (200). The words in the letters and the books are what allow her to escape the life she doesn’t want and free her from a destiny that is inopportune. One again, the power of texts prevails, what English teacher can argue with that? Happy reading!