A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly
My rating: 4/5 cats
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 grown-up 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 adult-fiction 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 well-drawn, 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 thus-and-such.”
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…
