It isn't always a happy story, but it is a truthful one; it never glosses over the harsh realities of life, especially for women of the time, and it faithfully empowers women in a manner that is never overbearing, merely subtle. 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". It touches on a lot of issues – racial injustice, the situation of women at the beginning of the 20th century, poverty and family ties – and it does so in a very realistic way. They reveal some shocking information about Grace's lover, Chester Gillette, who checked into the hotel as Carl Grahm. It's a clever device and works well, but I was more interested in Mattie and her world than in the murder itself.

Jennifer Donnelly is now one of my all-time fave authors, and her novel Revolution also definitely deserves to be read. A young girl, Mattie, is entrusted by a female guest at the hotel where she works with some letters and instructed to burn them. That made me, if possible, even more keen to turn the pages to find out how the two parts of the story would finally merge. All those present-tense chapters, where we read the (genuine) letters written by a 1906 murder victim are just, to change the metaphor, the icing on the cake. The sky, gray and lowering for much of the year, becomes an ocean of blue, so vast and brilliant you can’t help but stop what you’re dong—pinning wet sheets to the line maybe, or shucking a bushel of corn on the back steps—to stare up at it.He kills Grace by hitting her with a tennis racket to render her unconscious and drowns her in Big Moose Lake by tipping their boat over. 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. Chose this book after reading Tea Rose which I loved but Gathering Light was slow and nearly gave up on it after a few chapters, it did get better however but found it well written but bland and would not pass it on to my friends. I also wondered whether he might be ‘Royal’ to represent the dangerous temptation of being rescued by a fairy-tale prince. Set in northern Herkimer County, New York in 1906, it is based on the murder of Grace Brown case —the basis also for An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1925).

She uses her words to describe the tragedy she sees all around her, although she does her best to not be weighed down by it. Next day the woman is found drowned in Big Moose Lake - should Mattie read the letters or destroy them as requested. Using the framework of the drowning of a young woman in 1906 Jennifer Donnelly gathers up the threads and images present in a poor close knit farming community in the Adirondacks and uses it like a loom to weave together a complex pattern in which oppression and repression intermingle with ambition and vision.Her generosity to all the struggling characters before she gets on her way to the big wide world is insidious right-wing sentimentalism: look how, by working hard, your prosperity trickles down. Girls, don’t you believe Fitzgerald and all that doom-laden stuff at the end of The Great Gatsby; believe the Dreeem. She also has a new teacher, Miss Wilcox, who supports Mattie’s writing with intensity, and has dark secrets of her own. The genre of a bookish, misunderstood girl who fights against the strictures of society so that she can be a liberated woman.