| Product: |
A Gathering Light - Jennifer Donnelly |
| Date: |
21/10/05 (1258 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: a wonderful novel to chill out with and read at the end of a hard day
Disadvantages: the amount of old enlish language that i didn't understand
A gathering light – Jennifer Donnelley
At the turn of the century, this novel is based in North America, where things are just beginning to become modern. Mattie is the mother hen of her brothers and sisters, due to the fact that she promised her mum while she was on her deathbed. Lawton, her older brother has left her to deal with their younger siblings, Beth, Lou and Abby. Mattie really wants to explore the world and write novels, but with her father wanting her to stay back so that he can’t lose another family member, she could end up no-where at the end of it all. Mattie has a coloured best friend named weaver, the only black in the area, who’s father died for standing up for himself to the whites of the country, and weaver was the only free born in his family, the rest of his family were either brought up in the slave trade and freed later, or lived and died in the slavery camps. Weaver only moved up to North America because of all the racism elsewhere in America. Weaver is incredibly smart and is even smarter than Mattie. They also have one other best friend named Minnie who is always fed up of them constantly arguing. Minnie is the oldest of the three, being married and pregnant at the start of the story.
This book goes from the past; the above paragraph to the present times; the next paragraph, and in between, you get a little confused in it all, but apart from that, the ending is amazingly entwined together.
The present: a girl, grace from the hotel up the road in which Mattie was working at has drowned in the river, with no sign of her partner, Carl who went out sailing with her. A few days before this had happened however, grace, gave Mattie some letters and told her to burn them. Mattie had wondered why. Mattie got all sorts of weird requests, like ‘…butterscotch pudding, then got cross when you brought it to them because now they wanted chocolate…’ but never in Mattie’s whole entire life had she thought that she would get handed a handful of letters and told to burn them. Mattie decided that under the circumstances, she would keep them for the time being just to make sure that grace didn’t want the letters back. Now that grace’s body was found, Mattie had to destroy them quickly before someone found them. Grace’s boyfriends name was Carl, but all the letters were addressed to Chester. To Mattie, this was an unsolved mystery, just waiting to have a story made of it. She had a choice to destroy them, if she ever found the time to, without being interrupted, or to keep them and see what happens.
With boyfriends, abuse, a family to care for, a stubborn dad and having to grow out of childhood and in to adulthood, this is a moving and wonderful novel to read. The letters make the perfect ending to the story that brings it all together perfectly. Jennifer Donnelly writes this book wonderfully and I thoroughly enjoyed it. At the end of a stressful winter’s day, I recommend getting into a nice cosy warm bed with a hot chocolate and a good novel, the novel being a gathering light. I recommend this novel to adults; late teenagers and I think this would be a good novel to read for GCSE’s or A-levels because of the amount of old English in it. The only thing that I find hard is that you need to be a confident reader to read some of the old English in this book. I have had to re-read some of the sentences in this book to try to understand it.
Comments on the book:
‘This is a wonderfully rich, involving and beautifully written book.’ Guardian
‘A breathtakingly good novel.’ Daily Mail
‘If George Clooney had walked into the room I would have told him to come back later when I’d finished’ Sunday Telegraph
This book has also won the Carnegie medal.
Prices, availability and other information:
Amazon: used and new from £0.01 or their price: £5.59
E-bay: from £0.99
Tesco: £5.24
RRP: £6.99
Publisher: Bloomsburypbk’s contact: www.jenniferdonnelly.co.uk
www.bloomsbury.com
Or even pop down to your local library to borrow it for a while.
Printed in 2003.
Well, my conclusion is that this book is just fabulous, and although hard to read in places, I recommend it highly. I give it nine out of ten for being a wonderful novel, but it missed a mark because I had to go back in some places to re-read a sentence, to be able to get it.
Thanks for reading. Angiexxx
Summary: A promise is a promise, that shouldn't be broken, will this destroy mattie's dreams?
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