A Gathering Light

A Gathering Light, by Jennifer Donnelly, is set at the begining of the twentiest century and is based partially on a true story. The main character is a girl called Mattie and she is seventeen, she is a farming girl who's mother died a few years ago and her brother has left them for reasons that are unclear. She has to cook meals for her younger sisters and father and has to help with farming work like ploughing which is a man's job. What she really wants to do is go to colledge and become a writer which she is encouraged to do by her teacher and  closest friends. At the beginning of the book she wants to get a job at the Glenmore hotel in the north woods not far from where she lives, her father says no, she gets a job there for other reasons in the end and that's where the story begins. A couple of weeks after she gets a job a woman who is staying at the hotel drowns in the lake by the hotel while out boating with a man. Before this happens the woman had given Mattie some letters with instructions to burns them and Mattie discovers the truth about her death. The book flits between the one night in which Mattie is reading her letters and the year's worth of backstory about why Mattie is there and her other problems. I thought that it wasn't a bad book but it is more of a girls book than a boys. It is quite grown up and so I would recommend it to 12 year olds and over.

By Kit Livsey