Chapter By Chapter

Five days after reading A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly, I still find Mattie Gokey walking around in my thoughts. She is afraid of being alone and yet just as afraid of losing her independence. She is fascinated by the lives of others and frustrated with her reality, one that doesn’t lend itself neatly to a storybook happy ending. She’s as real as anyone I know, but I keep reminding myself that she’s just a character in a book.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt different. I’ve never been a surface friend or someone who does tasks at less than 100%. I am drawn to the most impoverished of students and the most challenging of situations. I was raised a giver and thus strive to live as selflessly as I can. From Hurricane Katrina Pet Rescue to an orphanage in Jamaica, I’ve extended my hands to causes in need. That’s where I’m most comfortable. It’s no wonder then that I am drawn to the depths of Mattie’s honest emotion and her strength that is born in the face of adversity. Upon hearing of the illness that has swept through her home, Mattie rushes to the bedsides of her sick sisters and father. When Weaver’s mama loses her home and her son’s college money, Mattie rescues them with her life savings. I am like her in so many ways… perfectly imperfect, desperate to be loved and concurrently fearful of the natural consequences of love.

A lover of literature, Mattie says, “I used to wonder what would happen if characters in books could change their fates” (84). Ironically, I wonder the same about her. What if she’d chosen the expected route of marriage over education? Isn’t she persistent enough to seek her passion while making a home with a man? What if her mother had lived? What if her brother hadn’t left? What if she’d burned those letters? Would she have still reflected upon her life as deeply and made the same choices? I feel silly, but amidst those questions, I wonder what happened at Barnard. Did she become a writer? Did she ever marry? A true sign of an authentic character, I keep forgetting that Mattie isn’t real.

With two plotlines weaving throughout the pages, the structure of A Northern Light is speckled with chapter titles like “con-fab-u-late” (314) and “Uri-ah the Hit-tite, stink-pot, warthog” marking the past and untitled chapters marking the present. In the end, both come together to tell the rest of Mattie’s adventures. Mattie’s quirky love of words and resulting “words of the day” and word wars with Weaver, show her intelligence as a young girl, as well as her adolescence.

The great level of detail found in this book gives it substance and contributes to the legitimacy of the time period. Clearly much research went into creating a book that is historically valid. From Grace’s letters and the abundance of literary references to the depictions of farm life and authentic language, every element helps put Eagle Bay on the map. Donnelly even goes as far as to describe a home birth, “She pushed instead – on Minnie’s enormous belly – and rubbed and pummeled and kneaded until she was panting and the sweat was streaming down her face. Then she wrenched Minnie’s knees apart and peered between them again. “You son of a gun, you…Come on!” she yelled, kicking the stool away” (91-91). It’s hard not to admire an author whose passion and energy you can feel within the pages.

Perhaps A Northern Light reminds me of the time I spent in my youth reading Laura Ingalls Wilder or the Orphan Train children books. One of my favorite series (and therefore movie) is Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I’ve always liked tales about the frontier and rural life at the turn of the century. I like the dresses and the ambitious, headstrong dreams of the girls in these stories. To me, their survival instincts and behaviors, although fictional, are proof of how resilient the human spirit is. I can only hope that I continue to be as resilient as Mattie as the chapters unfold in my own life.