Teen Stuff: A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Wed, 03/03/2010 - 12:01pm by Caser

In the summer of 1906, at a posh resort in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York, the body of twenty year old Grace Brown was discovered beneath a capsized boat. Her boating companion, Chester Gillette, had mysteriously disappeared. What happened next became transfixed in America's consciousness, as Gillette was put on trial for the murder of his clandestine lover, who was pregnant with his child at the time of death. The trial is famous for its readings of Grace's love letters to Chester, which were then sold in booklet form after the trial. Gillette was convicted of murder despite his persistent pleas of innocence and the fact that the evidence used against him was purely circumstantial. He was executed in the electric chair in 1908.

In Jennifer Donnelly's historical fiction reimagining of these events, A Northern Light, sixteen year old Mattie Gokey is an aspring writer who works at Big Moose Lake lodge, where the murder takes place. She is entrusted by Grace Brown to take her letters and burn them, just before Grace heads out on her doomed canoe trip. In this startlingly realistic narrative, the novel confronts issues of gender, racial, and class prejudice with a detailed backdrop of American life at the turn of the 20th century.

Also check out Theodore Dreiser's classic novel, An American Tragedy, and the brilliant 1951 film, A Place in the Sun, with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, for other renderings of this murderous affair.