So I just finished A
Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. And…I wanted to like it. I really did.
The whole time I was reading I felt like I was forcing myself to like it, to
ignore the little voice telling me that I really wasn’t enjoying this book.
Then I reached the end and just gave up. Nope. I did not like this book. Did
not work for me. And once I let myself think about it, it was very easy for me
to figure out why.
Quick synopsis: The story is built around a real murder that
happened at the Glenmore Hotel in the Adirondacks (now the Glenmore Bar and
Grill) in 1906. A young woman from Utica and her fiancé went out boating, and
the woman’s body was discovered in the lake. Mattie Gokey is a young woman who
works at the Glenmore to help support her father and three younger sisters.
Mattie loves to read and write, and dreams of going to Barnard College in NYC,
but due to extenuating circumstances (a promise to her mother on her deathbed,
her father’s stubbornness, the family’s tight financial situation, her feelings
for a local boy, etc.) Mattie cannot go to college.
There were a lot of reasons why this book should have worked
for me. First, it was set in Upstate New York. I recognized most of the names
of towns and places mentioned in the book—my family used to vacation at the
Sagamore, we hiked the Adirondacks and the Catskills, we lived in Albany, I
have extended family in Rome and Syracuse, and my family drives through Utica,
Oneida, and Cortland all the time. I loved Donnelly’s description of the
Upstate NY accent (I don’t care how it’s spelled, it’s pronounced ‘crik’ not
‘creak’!) and I thought she did a great job of capturing life in Upstate New
York—the farms, the apple orchards, and especially the insular nature of the
towns and their suspicion of outsiders.
There were other reasons I wanted to like A Northern Light—a geeky, literary
protagonist! A family of sisters! A completely accurate description of what
it’s like to work in a fancy kitchen! (Maybe that’s just me…) Realistic
portrayals of day-to-day life! No sugar-coating what life was like for women
and minorities! Super-well rounded characters! And of course, a murder mystery.
That was probably why this book and I were destined not to
like each other—I love mysteries. I devour them. If you open with the
protagonist trying to fulfill a promise to a murdered young woman to burn the
woman’s secret love letters, then you have me hook, line, and sinker.
Unfortunately for me, the mystery never went beyond Mattie worrying about what
to do with the letters and wondering if Grace’s death was an accident or not.
In fact, unless like me you read author’s note in the back, you won’t find out
until the last page that Grace’s fiancé will be charged with her murder.
The real-life murder was interesting, but Donnelly didn’t
seem to know how to make it anything more than it was: a framing device. There
were several moments during the story that I wondered why Donnelly had even
bothered to include the murder, and I didn’t get any sort of answer until the
last couple of pages, and even then I found it unsatisfying. After reading
Grace’s letters, Mattie reverses her decision to stay in the Adirondacks and
marry her beau Royal, and basically solves everyone’s problems in five minutes
(and about half a page) before running off to New York City to become a writer.
While Donnelly showed how Grace’s letters were affecting Mattie emotionally,
until those last ten pages there was no hint that the letters were going to
have that big of an impact on Mattie’s life.
That was another reason I did not like this book: I knew as soon
as we learned that Mattie loved to write wanted to move to New York City (about
fifteen pages in) that by the end of the book she would move to New York City
to become a writer. Now, I didn’t mind that I knew the ending from the start.
After all, in most stories it’s not the conclusion that’s the interesting part,
but all the dips and turns the protagonists have to take to get to their goals.
But after a while I found all of the set-backs and obstacles thrown in Mattie’s
path to be tedious.
To count off: She swore to her mother on her deathbed that
she would take care of her family. Her father doesn’t like her writing and
doesn’t want her to go to college. Mattie likes a boy named Royal and if she
married him it would help with her family’s financial situation. Mattie’s uncle
promises her money, but then disappears the next day. Mattie’s aunt doesn’t
like girls who read. Mattie’s mentally unstable neighbor is going to lose her
land. The family mule dies, so the financial situation is even worse. Mattie’s
whole family falls ill. Mattie’s best friend’s house gets burned down, so he
loses the money he saved to go to New York. Oh, and Mattie’s brother ran away
before the story even started, so her father needs her to help run the farm.
I felt like I was playing Oregon Trail: things would be
going along steadily, then—Mary has dysentery! Your wagon wheel cracked! Your
oxen died! The pigs stole your eggs! (That may have been a different game…)
Point is, it seemed as if each of those problems rose up out of nowhere, gave
Mattie trouble for a chapter or two, and then was resolved with little struggle
or cost.
A perfect example: in the first chapter, we meet two
children of the aforementioned mentally unstable neighbor. The neighbor, Emmie,
has seven (I think) children from different fathers. She drinks too much,
suffers from an ill-defined mental illness, can’t/won’t care for her children,
carries on an affair with her married neighbor, and is in danger of being
evicted and having her children taken because she can’t pay her taxes. Then,
when she takes in her friend because the friend’s house burned down, everything
magically becomes better in a matter of days. The part that bothered me the
most was there was no hint that she still suffered from any kind of mental
illness or was still drinking. This was how it was with every problem in the
book—people would be in trouble, but then a solution would present itself and
everything would be magically fixed, or even better than before.
Another thing that drove me nuts was the sense of timing. I
struggled the whole book to figure out when each event was taking place in
relation to all the other events. I’ve heard the argument that thanks to film,
writers have become too reliant on neatly labeling when and where the action is
taking place (for instance, April 23,
2367. The Planet Zeenon. Or even, Four
Hours Later.) But this was an instance where I really could have used some
labels.
The story opens with the discovery of Grace’s body, but then jumps back
several months to Mattie’s life before working at the hotel. And then jumps to
a few years before the story, when her friend showed their teacher Mattie’s
writing. And then jumps to a few hours before Grace’s death, when she gave
Mattie the letters. And then jumps to a few hours after Grace’s death, when
Mattie reads the letters. And then jumps to Mattie’s birthday after she’s
working at the hotel but before Grace’s death. And then—yeah. I felt like I
needed a Time Lord to guide me through all the jumps in this story. I can only
imagine how difficult it would be to listen to as a book on tape.
Then there’s Mattie and Royal’s romance, which reads like
it’s straight out of a Harlequin Historical Romance from the 1980s: there’s
lots of Mattie telling Royce ‘no’ and then accepting/justifying it when he
won’t take no for an answer. There are several moments when she seems genuinely
thrilled to be making out with him, but it’s only okay because he instigated it
and they’re engaged—god forbid she just enjoy any sort of physical pleasure. I
recognize that the author was being realistic to the time period, but by the
end it was really bothering me and I could have used just a small moment that
acknowledged this wasn’t okay. Even worse: at one point Mattie’s friend, a
young mother, tells Mattie that her husband is forcing her to have sex. So,
raping her. But later Mattie sees the two of them kissing and thinks: “I knew
it was sweet, what they had. Despite their troubles. And I hoped I would have
something like it.” A man forcing his
tired and ill wife to have sex? Deplorable, but also realistic for 1906. The
protagonist calling their relationship sweet and hoping for the same thing
someday? Ugh. No. Not okay. Especially not in a YA novel.
Finally, there were lots of little things that didn’t work
for me. Mattie’s father hits her and (sort of) apologizes but his actions are
never truly condemned. Mattie’s brother ran away before the story even started,
so I assumed he was a Chekov’s Gun who would show up at some opportune moment,
but then he never did. I found it annoying that this character who caused so
many of the problems in the story didn’t warrant even two seconds of screen
time. There were several mentions of Mattie’s father mis-managing the farm, but
that was never fully explained. Mattie’s sister dresses like a boy because she
misses their brother and wants her father’s attention, but again this was never
really explored and was dropped by the end. Mattie repeatedly worries about the
sous-chef sharpening his knives at night, because it’s supposed to be bad luck,
but again nothing came of it. That was how I felt about this book in general:
there were a lot of interesting characters and I was genuinely invested in
their problems, but then nothing came of it.
When I was thirty pages from the end (the book is 380 pages
long) I called Buggy, who had read the book when it came out in 2003. I was
confused, because I knew I was almost at the end, but there was no hint of any
of the major plots being resolved, and there were some hints the author had
dropped early (like why Weaver was so sad) that hadn’t been explained. Ten
pages from the end, and still nothing had been resolved. The whole plot wrapped
itself up in the last four pages with Mattie using her money to solve her
various friends’/family’s financial problems, writing letters to solve all of
the emotional problems (her father’s reluctance to let her go, her engagement,)
and hopping a train to New York City because she wanted to tell the story of a
woman who she had known for all of three days and who had been dead for a few
hours.
Sorry, that doesn’t cut it for me.
--Cates
