Sixteen year-old Mattie Gokey dreams of someday becoming a great writer, telling of life how it really is, without the fairy tale ending. After her mother's death from cancer and her brother's abandoning the family, she is left to care for her younger sisters and father as well as try to keep up the small family farm. The pressures of her home life threaten to steal away her dream, but Mattie holds tight to her hopes for the future. When she takes a summer job, she meets Grace Brown, who asks Mattie to burn a stack of letters. When Grace's body is discovered later that day in the nearby lake, Mattie feels torn about the letters and the promise she's made.
True to Mattie's heart for writing, this story looks full in the face of the hardships that Mattie's family and others in her community suffer. Mattie struggles against the course her life would take, torn between accepting what her community offers and striking out, following her heart.
I enjoyed the story. The characters were engaging, different. Mattie plays a game, finding a new word in the dictionary every day. So each chapter begins with her new word, and somehow ties in with what's going on. I thought that was a clever idea.
A Northern Light won The Carnegie Medal and Los Angeles Times Book Prize as well as being a Michael L. Printz Honor Book.
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