A Northern Light
A Novel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt · Print & ebook · September 15, 2004
Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has a word for everything, and big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true.
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- Who it’s for
- A layered YA novel that reads cleanly for class and still leaves room to think.
- Genres
- 20th-Century US YA, YA Mysteries, Death & Grief for Teens
- Published
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 15, 2004
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Start with this bookAbout this book
Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has a word for everything, and big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true. She collects words, stores them up as a way of fending off the hard truths of her life, the truths that she can't write down in stories. The fresh pain of her mother's death. The burden of raising her sisters while her father struggles over his brokeback farm. The mad welter of feelings Mattie has for handsome but dull Royal Loomis, who says he wants to marry her.
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And the secret dreams that keep her going--visions of finishing high school, going to college in New York City, becoming a writer. Desperate for money, she takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters. But when Grace's drowned body is fished from Big Moose Lake, Mattie discovers that the letters could reveal the grim truth behind a murder.Set in 1906 in the Adirondack Mountains, against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser'sAn American Tragedy, this Printz Honor-winning coming-of-age novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original.
Quietly Taut
A layered YA novel that reads cleanly for class and still leaves room to think.
Come here for
- classroom-ready historical YA
- grief, murder, and book-club discussion
Expect
- 20th-century American setting
- orphan story with grief at the center
Where it sits
| YA Mysteries | 89% |
|---|---|
| 20th-Century US YA | 74% |
| Death & Grief for Teens | 44% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- 20th-Century US YA
- Authors
- Hope Davis, Jennifer Donnelly, Listening Library
- Publisher
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Published
- September 15, 2004
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- 20th-Century US YA