《聚光灯下》 It’s 1906 and 16-year-old Mattie Gokey is at a crossroads* in her life. She’s escaped the overwhelming* responsibilities of helping to run her father’s brokedown farm in exchange for a paid summer job as a serving girl at a fancy hotel in the Adirondacks. She’s saving as much of her salary as she can, but she’s having trouble deciding how she’s going to use the money at the end of the summer. Mattie’s gift is for writing and she’s been accepted to Barnard College in New York City, but she’s held back by her sense of responsibility to her family — and by her budding romance with handsome but dull Royal Loomis. At the hotel, Mattie gets caught up in the disappearance of a young couple who had gone out together in a rowboat. Mattie spoke with the young woman, Grace Brown, just before the fateful* boating trip, when Grace gave her a packet of love letters and asked her to burn them. When Grace is found drowned, Mattie reads the letters and finds that she holds the key to unraveling* the girl’s death and her beau’s* mysterious disappearance. Grace Brown’s story is a true one (it’s the same story told in Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and in the film adaptation, “A Place in the Sun”), and author Jennifer Donnelly masterfully interweaves the real-life story with Mattie’s. Mattie’s frank voice reveals much about poverty, racism, and feminism at the turn of the 20th century. Readers will get a taste of how bitter — and how sweet — ordinary life in the early 1900s could be. The book is available at online bookstores like jd.com. (SD-Agencies) |