Mattie is a beautifully-realised and highly engaging character, and Jennifer Donnelly has created an absorbing story, part mystery/part coming-of-age novel, which will hold the reader's attention to the last. And soon after it arrived, I began reading it, tossing away the resolution to not before exams (see, exams never seem to end in my life).

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.

And it's not just this: Mattie yearning to be both an educated woman and eventually an author, as well as have a family and a loving husband.

She is a co-author of Fatal Throne, which explores the lives of King Henry VIII's six wives, for which she wrote the part of Anna of Cleves, Henry's fourth wife. Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Jennifer Donnelly's novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original. While society pushes Mattie towards a life of love and comfort in a house with children, her own heart begins to push her that way too, which makes the decision to chase her dream that much more difficult. i did love the french canadian uncle (very very familiar voice there) - but many other elements seemed too fleeting.Quite thankfully, though, a lovely review convinced me to pick this one up and I'm so very glad I did. Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam. Lindsay Fraser, Sunday Herald 'A GATHERING LIGHT is a remarkable debut, a book that sweeps across the genre boundaries of murder, mystery, romance, and historical fiction - resulting in an original novel that is both gripping and touching. I distinctly remember the first time round I read this book, how my heart both soared with hers and then came crashing down when things got rough.

When the novel begins, the body of a drowned woman, Grace Brown, is found near the inn where Mattie works. The prose is pictorial and detailed, conveying the surroundings, the characters and their feelings so nicely.Next day the woman is found drowned in Big Moose Lake - should Mattie read the letters or destroy them as requested.

The genre of a bookish, misunderstood girl who fights against the strictures of society so that she can be a liberated woman. Must you take the tapestry you have woven with care and talent and unpick its beauty simply because others tell you such a tapestry is a waste of thread and they declare your image of beauty to be mistaken and foolish. It has a totally different voice, but was a very engaging read in its own way - although a little emo ;) .Irritating touch No 98: the black kid gets beaten up by whites – he’s been behaving even more like Will Smith, talking like a brother from nearly a century later – and, get this: the white lawman sticks them in jail. And that, my friends, is what made this story so wonderful, "something moving, and real, and wholly original". 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.