A Northern Light

I read A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly. This book is about a girl's dream to become a published author. I chose this book because it sounded interesting to me.

Mattie Gokey wanted to go to college and become a published author, but after her mother's death it seems impossible. Mattie's mother made her promise never to leave her brother, three sisters, and her father. Then Mattie's brother Lawton left after having a fight with her father. All of Mattie's dreams are slowly just becoming dreams and no longer becoming a reality. She has the everything she needs, the money, the acceptance letter, even a place to stay, but it is all worthless due to that promise and the disapproval of her father and Royal, the man Mattie plans on marrying. When she gets a job at the Glenmore hotel, a women named Grace Brown asks her to burn a pile of letters. Later that day Grace Brown's body is pulled out of the river after she supposedly drowned. Mattie reads the letters and finds out the true story of Grace's death. Mattie must decide whether to leave her family, the man of her dreams Royal, and everything she has ever known and go to college, or stay knowing the real story of Grace Brown but never being able to let it out.

One of the things I liked about this book is the suspense. I also liked all the unexpected turns the book takes. One of the things I didn't like was that it ended kind of suddenly and I wished the author had continued to write. Another thing I didn't like was it got confusing at times because it kept going from the present back to Mattie's past. I think this book is appropriate for anybody over the age of 12 because it is very graphic at times and the author doesn't hold back at all with her descriptions of certain things. Also this book contains a lot of big and confusing words so you have to be able to understand them in order to understand the book. I would defiantly recommend it to a friend or anyone who likes books that take place in the late 1800s and early 1900s.