Her eyes were fixed om me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish had said and that I should leave then and there. I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. 'Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox,' I said, pointing at a pile of them,' and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?' I asked too loudly. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way. '.you're not,' Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers. The people in the books-the heroes- they're always so.heroic. And things go well for Anne Elliot in the end, but they don't go well for most people.' My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. It's just that there are no Captain Wentworths, are there? But there are plenty of Pap Finns. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up.' Like in Huckleberry Finn where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy ending and all that. 'The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. “Well it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths.,' I began. ― Jennifer Donnelly, quote from A Northern Light

And the gloom that broods under the pines always. I'd seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maples in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. And the sliver moon of winter, so high and blinding.

I'd seen a bear cub lift it's face to the drenching spring rains. I'd seen all the things she'd spoken of and more besides. 'Look around yourself, Mathilda,' she said. She said literature was meant to uplift the heart and that a young woman such as myself ought to turn her mind to topics more cheerful and inspiring than lonely hermits and dead children.

She said she'd read my stories and found them morbid and dispiriting. Miss Parrish took me aside one day after school let out.

A northern light by jennifer donnelly