JENNIFER DONNELLY'S debut novel, A Gathering Light, is unquestionably one of the year's top reads. It is a spellbinding and moving story about a young girl's struggle to be herself set against the backdrop of a true-life murder that rocked turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America.
For 17-year-old Mattie, growing up on a small farm in the Adirondack Mountains in the early 1900s is a daily struggle. She has promised her dying mother that she would always look after her father and her three younger sisters no matter what happened, and now that promise is hanging heavily around her neck.
Mattie is a bookworm and she loves the power of words and stories and poetry. Her teacher, the enigmatic Miss Wilcox, introduces her to novelists and poets who inspire Mattie to dream of becoming a writer herself.
But Mattie knows that she will never be able to escape from the tight rural community where she has always lived. Her future life is mapped out for her by her oppressive father.
Mattie's hopeless life, her dreams, and her love for her family and her boyfriend, the handsome but unintellectual Royal Loomis, are all played out against a real-life murder that gripped America in 1906.
A young woman guest at a lakeside hotel where Mattie is working for the summer gives her a bundle of letters and asks her to burn them. The next day, the woman is found drowned in the lake and a hunt begins for the man who was with her in the boat at the time of her death.
Mattie has not had time to destroy the woman's letters. She is faced with a dreadful dilemma. Should she hand over the letters to the police? Should she read them? Or should she burn them as the young woman had requested?
