Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I landed a promotional copy of Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light when I was working at Borders (may it rest in peace); thanks to digital audio books, I finally got around to ‘reading’ it.  (It’s not that it didn’t look interesting–it’s just that so very many books look interesting.  All the time.)  Listening is a form of reading, of course, since you do experience the book, but I have to specify because the narrator deserves her very own shout-out.  She did an excellent southern accent, French-Canadian accent, and Irish brogue, which is a couple of good accents more than many narrators can do.  If you can listen to this one, you should totally do it.  (Although it may have made some of the flashback points a bit harder to track.)  But I digress…

Okay, possibly I digress because I’m finding it hard to review this book.  It was full of a lot of hard things, although none of them were necessarily unrealistic; the ending was the least believable part of the book for me, and yet I’m not sure what I would have done differently that would have made it a workable story; and most of the people in it were complicated, with likable and unlikable traits tangled up together.  (That last, of course, is life, but it made for an emotionally complicated story to read, and far fewer truly likable characters.)  The real-life murder that forms part of the plot was one of the draws for me, and Donnelly did an excellent job with it, as far as Wikipedia and I could tell.  Ultimately, Mattie’s story stuck with me, wandering in and out of my mind, far more than many novels do, which is a recommendation in and of itself; I may not have always liked the characters, OR what some of them were doing, but I couldn’t leave them alone until Donnelly was done with them.  Mattie, her sisters, her pa, her friends, and the Glenmore itself are lingering a bit still, to be honest with you.  If you’re looking for YA historical fiction/coming of age with a bit of grittiness–some language, mostly milder, a great deal of the hardness of life, and a bit of teenager fooling around, so to speak–this one fits the bill nicely.  Let me know what you think!