Book+Review+(Rom,+Hist+Fic)+-+A+Northern+Light

=**Other YA Novels Have Fangs;** **A Northern Light** **has Teeth**= These days, the mere mention of a sixteen-year-old girl in the thrall of her first passion immediately triggers visions of sparkly vampires and razor-toothed werewolves. Jennifer Donnelly’s //A Northern Light//, which tells the story of Mathilda “Mattie” Gokey, a farmer’s daughter growing up in New York’s North Woods in the early 1900s, is a welcome reminder that it is entirely possible to write a captivating novel involving teenage romance that actually focuses on the girl. While there are shades of other teenage heroines—including //Little Women//’s Jo March, //Speak//’s Melinda Sordino, and, yes, Bella Swan herself—in Mattie Gokey, she is indisputably her own woman.  Mattie’s coming-of-age and emergence into womanhood are, in fact, the heart of this novel, despite the fact that some would call //A Northern Light// historical fiction. The book certainly provides ample information about the lives of farmers, loggers, and other year-round inhabitants of what were then just becoming the now-popular summer resort areas of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. In addition, Mattie’s fictional life is shown to briefly cross paths with that of Grace Brown, a real-life resort visitor whose suspicious death sparked one of this country’s most controversial murder trials of the early twentieth century. Donnelly has wisely managed to incorporate the level of detail that usually makes historical fiction both useful to teachers and dreadful to their teenage readers into her novel without letting it overwhelm the story of Mattie’s personal trials and tribulations. In one memorable scene, Mattie’s family’s cow, Daisy, has broken through several fences, ending up in a pond on land that belongs to the family of neighborhood hottie Royal Loomis. Royal, a natural at farming but not much for the book learning that excites Mattie, shows Mattie how to throw stones at Daisy’s back end to motivate the cow to leave the pond and head for home. While Mattie gapes at Royal’s physical attractiveness, Royal taunts, “ ‘Don’t none of them books of yours tell you how to get a cow out of a pond?’” (117). Mattie, who aspires to attend college and become a writer—dreams unheard of for a girl of her socioeconomic status in 1906—has high ideals, but is also subject to very human emotional tides.  The depiction of Mattie’s interior struggles to reconcile her conflicting desires for the simple pleasures of life as a farmer’s wife and to experience a different, almost inconceivable, sort of existence rings true and still seems relevant to today’s teenage girls, many of whom will soon be forced to find their own ways of resolving the family/career dichotomy, albeit to a lesser extent than Mattie. Given the prominence of feminist themes, //A Northern Light// may be more appealing to female readers than their male counterparts, though there are (in Royal Loomis and Weaver Smith, the only African-American teenager in the North Woods) some substantial male characters with compelling stories of their own to tell. Like the rest of the novel, their stories are focalized through Mattie, however, so the teacher looking to teach this as a whole-class novel would have some work to do in helping male students to see //A Northern Light// as relevant to their lives.  Teenage readers of both genders will be surprised and pleased to note that Donnelly has taken a more earthy (and probably more realistic) approach to depicting adolescent language and experience than do most novels for young adults set in earlier time periods. Donnelly has chosen, quite admirably, to prioritize presenting authentic voice and experience over presenting a “safe” novel. In so doing, she has probably foregone having her novel taught in many school settings, despite having been a contender for and winner of several major literary awards for young adult fiction. This is a novel that teachers should definitely preview before assigning, and one that I would see myself recommending as a choice novel only to strong readers who are also capable of handling mature themes. That said, this is also a novel rich with rewards for book lovers, history buffs, travel enthusiasts, and for those looking for a strong female heroine with whom to identify. I suspect that if high school girls would give //A Northern Light// a try, we’d have a lot of Team Mattie members on our hands.   A Northern Light //(2003) by Jennifer Donnelly, 380 pgs., is available in paperback from Harcourt, Inc.//