68. A NORTHERN LIGHT

Jennifer Donnelly 2003

Set in the Adirondacks, in 1906, the novel begins with a true story: Grace Brown, a 19 year old guest at Glenmore Hotel has drowned. This story is woven into a coming of age historical fiction involving 16 year old Matty Gokey, a young bookish heroine who begins her day with a word from the dictionary. She longs to be a writer and attend Barnard College. Told in alternating formats, she reads Grace Brown's letters and reconstructs her mysterious death as she recalls her life while growing up in poverty taking care of the household, her Pa and siblings Abby, Lou and Beth as well as her friendship with neighbor Weaver.

'When summer comes to the North Woods, time slows down. And some days it stops altogether. The sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can't help but stop what you're doing--pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps--to stare up at it.'(opening lines)

'Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get--a cold, sick feeling deep down inside--when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the same person you were.'(2)

'Weaver Smith should abandon his abcedarian efforts at eloquence, say uncle, and admit that Mathilda Gokey is the superior word duelist.'(39)

'It's my word of the day. I pick a word out of the dictionary every morning and memorize it and try to use it. It helps build vocabulary. I'm reading Jane Eyre right now and I hardly ever have to look up a word.'(53)

'And we must have a good, working acquaintance with the classics if we are to understand the works that follow them and progress in our own literary endeavors. Understanding literature is like building a house, Mr. Bouchard; you don't build the third story first, you start with a foundation...'(62)

'I remained on the ladder, looking at the figurine in my hand. You're wrong Auntie Josie, I thought. It's not pride I'm feeling. It's another sin. Worse than all the other ones, which are immediate, violent, and hot. This one sits inside you quietly and eats you from the inside out like the trichina worms the pigs get. It's the Eighth Deadly Sin. The one God left out. Hope.(114)

'They leave the thing behind sometimes, the guests. A bottle of scent. A crumpled handkerchief. A pearl button that fell off a dress and rolled under a bed. And sometimes they leave other sorts of things. Things you can't see. A sigh trapped in a corner. Memories tangled in the curtains. A sob fluttering against the windowpane like a bird that flew in and can't get back out. I can feel these things. They dart and crouch and whisper.(134)

'Furtive, my word of the day, means doing something in a stealthy way, being sly or surreptitious. Sneaky would be another way of putting it. I did not wish to become a sneak, but sometimes one had no choice. Especially when one was a girl and craved something sweet but couldn't say why, and had to wait till no one was looking to wash a bucket of bloody rags, and had to say she was "under the weather" when really she had cramps that could knock a moose over, and had to listen to herself be called "moody" and "weepy" and "difficult" when really she was just fed up with sore bosoms and stained drawers and the fact that she couldn't just live life in the open, swaggering and spitting and pissing up trees like a boy.'(161)

'People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well, hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?... Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? '(202)

'How was it that I could learn a new word every day, yet never know the right ones to tell my family how I felt?'(207)

'According the the article I'd read in Peterson's Magazine, if you wish to attract a man, you need to be "attentive and receptive to his every word, put his own interests before yours, and use the eloquent, unspoken language of the female body to let him know that he is the very center of you universe, the primary reason for your existence." The first two bits of advise were clear to me. I had trouble with the third one, though.'(222)

'Just then, I saw what Weaver would be, too. I saw him in a courtroom, thundering at the jury, commanding their eyes and ears, their hearts and souls and minds-- on fire with the strength of his convictions, the passion of his words.'(280)

'If you harness two horses together and one is stronger, the weaker horse gets buffeted and bruised. That's what being friends with Weaver was like. A farmer can put an evener on his team's yoke to compensate for the weaker horse by shifting some of the load to the stronger one. But you can't put an evener on two people's hearts or their souls. I wished I could just up and go to New York City. I wished I was as strong as Weaver was. I wished I was as fearless. But I was not.'(313)

'Voice, according to Miss Wilcox, is not just the sound that comes from your throat but the feeling that comes from your words.'(361)
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First Edition
380 pages
Book borrowed from the library
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Personal note: Thanks Booksnob for the Michael L. Printz awards list.