A Northern Light (2013) by Jennifer Donnelly

 1001 Novels: A Library of America

A Northern Light (2003)

by Jennifer Donnelly 

Big Moose Lake, New York

New York: 4/105

Upstate: 4/23

    I'm breaking off the up-state portion of New York as a separate "state"- everything north of Scarsdale, New York.  I might also divide up the borough's- really, though most of NYC is Manhattan.  I know that Manhattan is going to turn out to be the single biggest location in the 1001 Novels: A Library of America project, but I can't but feel an incipient dread.  After all, do we not already know the great (and not so great) novels of Manhattan?  No single place is depicted more in American literature and if you account for the fascination of writers themselves with New York, particularly with downtown New York, and the fact that the publishing industry for fiction is largely based in New York, well, it's the kind of overwhelming advantage the 1001 Novels: A Library of America project should be working to counter.

   So far upstate New York feels a lot like upstate New Hampshire and Vermont.   More industry, perhaps, but lots of lakes and over-intelligent daughters yearning to be free.  With A Northern Light the 1001 Novels project is back within the well-worn precincts of YA fiction.  Credit to the book, while it was obviously narrated by a teen girl, it wasn't entirely clear to me that this was marketed as YA fiction until I got prepared to write it up.  The plot is classic YA Lit:  A smart girl wants to get out of the middle of nowhere via college but she faces impediments to her plans.  She is influenced by a  sophisticated outsider of some sort.  Meanwhile, there is some kind of b-plot that invokes a mystery or current-event. 

  Here, the location is Big Moose Lake, New York.  The b-plot is the murder of a mistress at the hands of her big city paramour- the same story that forms the basis of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.   As this genre of book goes within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, it is less insufferable, perhaps because of the historical setting and the able handling of the issues of woman's rights that were nascent in that era.