Θέλω πρώτα απ' όλα να πω τρια πράγματα:
Ουάου
Δεν θέλω να προτρέχω, μιας και υπάρχουν κι άλλα βιβλία της συγγραφέα που δεν έχω διαβάσει ακόμα και ποτέ δεν ξέρεις, μπορεί να μην είναι το ίδιο καλά, αλλά έχοντας διαβάσει ήδη τα μισά, θέλω να πω πως την αγαπώ.
Επιτέλους ρε φίλε, μετά από τόσες φόλες μαζεμένες, έπεσε ξανά στα χέρια μου ένα καλό βιβλίο!
Για ακόμη μια φορά, η sitelinkJennifer Donnelly δεν με απογοήτευσε,
Σε αυτό το βιβλίο ακολουθούμε τη Μάτι, μια δεκαεξάχρονη κοπέλα που ζει στην επαρχία στις αρχές τουου αιώνα, τον αγώνα που κάνει προκειμένου να φροντίσει την οικογένειά της αλλά και να καταφέρει να σπουδάσει.
Αφορμή για να γραφτεί αυτό το βιβλίο, όπως λέει και η συγγραφέας στις ευχαριστήριες σημειώσεις, υπήρξε η δολοφονία μιας νεαρής κοπέλας από τον σύντροφό της. Κι οφείλω να παραδεχτώ πως αρχικά πίστευα πως η ηρωίδα μας, θα προσπαθούσε να λύσει το μυστήριο αυτού του θανάτου.
Αντ'αυτού όμως, τα γράμματα της Γκρέις η κοπέλα που πέθανε δίνουν αφορμή στη Μάτι να σκεφτεί τη δική της ζωή, την οικογένειά της, τους φίλους της και στο τέλος της δίνουν το θάρρος για να πετύχει αυτά που θέλει.
Και παρότι η ιστορία δεν πήγε εκεί που περίμενα, το βιβλίο παραμένει καλογραμμένο, οι χαρακτήρες ενδιαφέροντες και πολυδιάστατοι, το κάθε κεφάλαιο φροντίζει να σε κρατάει σε αγωνία κι όλα αυτά συμβάλουν σε μια θετική αναγνωστική εμπειρία.
If you made it this far, congratulations!
'Til next time, take care : : I dont quite understand why this book hasnt caught my attention earlier.
It is excellently written, features a strong and likable heroine and perfectly captures her hopes and fears in an era so different to our own.
It touches on a lot of issues racial injustice, the situation of women at the beginning of theth century, poverty and family ties and it does so in a very realistic way.
It doesnt look at things through rosecoloured glasses, and it certainly doesnt offer an ending with a bow safely tied around all problems, but that is just the way I prefer endings with books like these.
Life seldom offers curealls.
At its core, though, this book is a book about women and the problems they faced, the restrictions imposed on them, the difficult decisions they had to make in order to fulfil their dreams and the consequences these decisions so often had.
It follows Mattie, a sixteenyearold girl dreaming of going to college in New York City and becoming a famous writer, Unfortunately, Matties family situation doesnt allow for dreams: Her mother died of cancer, her older brother has run away and her father has lost all his joy of living.
Money is tight. Mattie is required to care for her younger sisters and help at the farm and expected to marry soon and become a farmers wife.
Her father refuses to acknowledge the chances New York offers for her, Mattie is torn between wanting to be there for her family and wanting to make her dreams come true, Working at the Glenmore hotel gives her the chance to earn her tuition, but will she be able to leave everyone she loves behind
Told in alternating chapters past and present merging towards the end loved this style, A Gathering Light brilliantly captures the hopes and dreams of a young woman and the general feeling of the era and time.
Matties voice is spot on the language is poetic but not overly so and evokes an overall feeling of nostalgia, of things ending, new ones beginning, of lost hopes and lost chances, with just the right amount of humour and lightness.
The mystery revolving around a young woman drowning in the lake is not so much a mystery, but more so just the most important one of the many episodes Mattie encounters on her way that help her make her decision at the end.
This book is not weighed down by an allconsuming love story, but I would have wished for the romance to be a bit more romantic and for me to actually be involved in it.
It is important to Mattie, but it was pretty clear for me as the reader that her choice would never make her happy even if she wanted to believe otherwise.
Random things I loved: Matties wordoftheday ritual and the "word wars" she fought with her friend Weaver, Cook the cook, Miss Wilcoxs library so jealous and the way the girls dealt with the guy from table six.
Something I wanted to add: I've only read one other book by Jennifer Donnelly, sitelinkRevolution, and it's amazing to see how different the two books are in voice.
I loved both of them, but I really applaud Jennifer Donnelly for successfully capturing two heroines who are poles apart, this mondaymorning float is for you, alfonso!
oh, a northern light, you were way better than i expected, i used to get really angry at this book, because it would come up in resort all the time and some people would just shelve it in my section because it looks like a grownup book, not like teen fiction, and i would always have to be yanking it off the shelves and saying "nooooo, you go downstairs!!" like shooing away a mischievous dog.
while i was reading it, i loved it,
a few days after, i am aware of plenty of weak spots underwritten parts, the ambition of too many storylines that maybe with a little pruning would have resulted in a fantastic book that i would want to read again and again.
but maybe that is what teen fiction is a stepping stone to truly great literature, i don't mean this to be disparaging observe how i have grown in my teen fiction stance, but younger readers lack the literary scope of people who have been around the block a few times with a few books.
their critical faculties are not as honed as more experienced readers, and so the soft spots an adult reader picks up on go unnoticed by younger readers who are carried away in the power of the narrative voice and the excitement of "what will happen next".
and that is good enough, really, for teen literature get them engaged in the text, get them hungry for reading, tell them a new and interesting story and teach them some new words along the way.
i am totally content with that,
mary k says, somewhat cynically, that books like these are written with the printz award in mind, this was in response, not to this book, but to marcelo in the real world, when i remarked that it would sell quite easily to an adult audience, so i wondered why it was being marketed at teen fiction.
this book, as is, i think would not do so well as an adultfiction title, but the care that went into writing it, and the multilayeredness of it it is certainly more ambitious than many of the other titles intended for a teen audience, and i say "three cheers".
the voice of this book is excellent, the main character is very welldrawn, for teen audience or otherwise, but tying together race issues, struggles with poverty, women's issues, a true crime story, and a family drama, just makes for a muddled focus, that you don't necessarily notice during the reading, but afterwards, there is a lot of, "hm, wonder what happened to thusandsuch".
it's just too much content, i love that she based this whole story around the murder that inspired an american tragedy, but i think even without that storyline, this would have been a wonderful novel of a girl with aspirations above her gender and financial situation, torn between her family and her ambition, with a strong subplot about her best friend's struggles with racial inequality in his own life.
done. call it a day.
i did love the french canadian uncle very very familiar voice there but many other elements seemed too fleeting, i would have liked more resolution with some of the storylines, but overall, this was a very fine novel, and i won't get mad if it tries to sneak onto my shelves again.
i won't let it stay, but i won't frown at it, i will give it a soft, "oh, you scamp" kind of look.
. .
sitelinkcome to my blog! Disliked this book for three reasons:
, Mattie irritated me. She was supposed to be so smart but I thought she was stupid, I'd figured out the big 'mystery' by the second page but she was clueless until nearly the end.
. Weaver also annoyed me. I mean yes he was discriminated against and treated badly, blah blah, but I felt no pity for him because he so obviously pitied himself enough for both of us.
His constant selfrighteous rage made me want to smack him,
. I thought the
writer was projecting her own viewpoints eg feminism, equal rights, being a stayathomemum is a waste of intelligence, real literature is miserable and makes you depressed and the rest is just fluffy chicklit onto the characters instead of trying to think how someone in that period would feel.
I hate it when writers give characters in historical fiction MODERN ideas and sensibilities, It's just lazy and incorrect, This one takes a little time to get some momentum going but once it does, it's good, I think the description is a little misleading, I think it's a more coming of age book than a mystery, I personally think sitelinkThe Tea Rose was a better written story by Donnelly but I think this was maybe her debut novel.
With that said, not bad at all, If I had to pick two words to describe the book, they would be "pretentious" and "boring, " Those apply both to the writing and to the protagonist, Mattie,
When I started reading this, I felt like it was geared toyear olds, The whole wordaday thing Mattie does seemed gimmicky and condescending, Granted, I am an adult, but if I had been assigned this as a teenager, I would have thought it was stupid, As the book went on, the "mystery" wasn't a mystery at all, and was barely addressed except in a line here or there.
I can see why this won an award The Carnegie Medal, UK's equivalent to the Newbery Medal, and why I picked this up.
If I'm going to be cynical, I'd say it won the award because it's long and dull, But I like to be optimistic, so I'm going to say that it was chosen because it paints a picture of the rural Adirondacks in, it uses vocabulary words, and it has feminist themes.
Note: I DO NOT recommend this toyear olds because of sexual content,
WHAT I LIKED
Donnelly got the rural aspect right, She certainly did plenty of research, and the characters have distinct voices,
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE
It's long, it's boring, and the copywriter in charge of writing the summary, using words like "mystery" and "romance," has clearly never read either genre.
The only humor in this novel is scatological or really awful puns, I usually like puns, but these all seem to be gathered off Popsicle sticks,
We'll get to the rest, below,
I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK IF
You constitute a dead body and an obvious, nobrainer solution to how it got there as "mystery"
You consider teenagers feeling each other up to be "romance"
You like your humor to be of the thirdgrade variety
WHY THE ONESTAR RATING
If I had abandoned this book around page, when I thought I would, it might have keptstars.
But for the sake of an honest review, I trucked through it, Every white male in this story is unintelligent as well as being either a rapist, abuser, drunk, murderer, or pervert, or else he just hasn't had a chance to be any one of those things yet.
So far, each woman is either a runaway or hates her life because she is always being taken advantage of by a man.
Or she's a bible thumping gossip, Weaver is the only likable character in this book, Every other character is a stereotype, I'm so tired of painting feminism as a false dichotomy betweenabsolute misery in motherhood andinevitable happiness in a successful career while being completely independent from family.
MY KIND OF FEMINIST NOVELS
Criteria:a female protagonist,a female author, in whichthere are fewer thanreferences to menstruation,no one is raped,the majority of male characters are NOT portrayed as rapists/drunks/addicts/abusive/murderers/perverts/chauvinists, andthe majority of female characters are NOT portrayed as miserable matriarchs or successful workaholicsthey are capable and have agency whether or not they have a family to care for.
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Delve Into A Northern Light Constructed By Jennifer Donnelly Accessible As Paperbound
Jennifer Donnelly