A Northern Light

"I did not like this book. This book makes marriage and mothering seem like the worst possible thing a woman can do. All the male characters, except one, are terrible, poorly-written, and dull. The internal conflict that the main character has is drugged out and time jumps in the book are very confusing. The real life murder case of Grace Brown woven into the story was the reason I picked up this book. However, this event is only in the background and falls very flat as a plot point. At times, I wondered why the author even bothered to include it. I’ve read other Donnelly works before and this has been by far my least favorite. I would not waste your time with this book. 2/5 stars."

"Not a bad story. To be honest it’s more about Mattie’s life than the murder itself. I went in thinking it was about a murder to instead find myself reading a book about 1906 NY and a girl on a farm with her three sisters, her dad, and some boy that liked her for her land?? I’m kind of confused. But to say the least - it was alright. "

"I loved this book. It’s so cool how it’s based on an actual case and I couldn’t put it down. The style of writing is 🤌 chefs kiss. "

"After re-reading <i>An American Tragedy</i> l found myself obsessed by the Chester Gillette/Grace Brown story. Donnelly uses the doomed Grace as a foil for her protagonist Mattie, an overworked, under-appreciated farm girl with a poetic soul.<br/><br/>And so the cliches begin. Mattie is an Undiscovered Genius, sneaking away to write poetry in her cheap composition books, and struggling to finish high school while caring for 3 younger sisters, a family of feckless neighbors, a farm, and a clinically depressed, borderline abusive father. She is courted by the town dreamboat and resident ******* who thinks reading is for losers; only her radical feminist teacher and her platonic black best friend understand and share her intellectual longings. Cue <I>Beauty and the Beast</i> soundtrack; there’s even a comical French Canadian uncle whose dialogue is pure Lumiere.<br/><br/>However, Donnelly manages enough nuance to keep her characters interesting. The ******* is cruel to the feckless neighbors, but turns out to have a somewhat understandable justification; the tyrannical father is grieving intensely for his dead wife; the feminist teacher hides a complicated backstory of her own. Mattie goes back and forth on the dilemma faced by many young women: can you fulfill your career ambitions and still find married happiness? Or, like Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson, are bright independent girls doomed to spinsterhood? And is that really such a bad thing?<br/><br/>It’s to Donnelly’s credit that she never offers a definitive answer, and that Mattie, the teacher, and the other women in the novel take various paths which may or may not work out. The key is that they be allowed to make these choices, that unlike Grace Brown they do not allow the men in their lives to decide. Donnelly never romanticizes the harrowing experience of rural farm life and motherhood, (Mattie bitterly deplores romantic writers who do) but she is also honest about all Mattie will give up if she leaves home for college in New York. Either option will be difficult and painful, but it remains Mattie’s choice.<br/><br/>Now on to my major critique of the book: Weaver, the platonic black best friend. He is brilliant, noble, courageous, devoted to his mother, and Mattie’s sole intellectual equal. Although he encounters violent acts of racism, it’s always on the part of outsiders: ignorant lumberjacks or cliched Southerners. <b>Everyone else in the novel</b> treats him with the colorblind deference of an after school special; yet when he lashes out with understandable rage at racist acts, he is subjected to pious and patronizing advice to “let it go” from well meaning white neighbors who do very little to address the racism.<br/><br/>Now it’s perhaps unrealistic to expect 1906 rural townsfolk to be “woke “ but it’s also unrealistic for Weaver and his mother to be so completely and unquestioningly accepted. Donnelly plays to the soothing myth progressive whites have spun for themselves, that it is only the comically obvious “bad guys” (preferably Southern, ugly, and with bad teeth) who are racist, whereas the majority of nice white folks who “don’t see color” have nothing to apologize for.<br/><br/>Even more galling, despite all their smarts and charisma, Weaver and his mother have little agency or depth: they succeed only thanks to the nobility of the “good” white characters, in fact they seem to exist only as their sounding boards and plot engines. Weaver is clearly a far better romantic match for Mattie than her oafish beau, yet this possibility is never even considered, (and surely a young white woman spending so much time with a young black man in a gossipy small community in 1906 would occasion comment?)<br/><br/>It’s nice that Donnelly wanted to expand the palette of her story to include a black character, but without a realistic black experience and context, this comes off as self-congratulatory window dressing. (A similar misfire is her hint that one character may be gay or trans, without exploring what that might mean for a teenager in 1906). <br/><br/>If you’re going to throw black or LGBTQ characters into a primarily heterosexual white story, do some research into what their lives would have been like. And make them real characters, not just an excuse to show off the nobility of your white straight protagonists."

"I read this book back to back about eight times in a row. It's awesome!"