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, making her seem even more real.

Mattie's frank voice reveals much about poverty, racism, and feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. She witnesses illness and death at a range far closer than most teens do today, and she's there when her best friend Minnie gives birth to twins. Mattie describes Minnie's harrowing labor with gut-wrenching clarity, and a visit with Minnie and the twins a few weeks later dispels any romance from the reality of young motherhood (and marriage). Overall, readers will get a taste of how bitter--and how sweet--ordinary life in the early 1900s could be. Despite the wide variety of troubles Mattie describes, the book never feels melodramatic, just heartbreakingly real. (14 and older) --Jennifer Lindsay

The story is told through the eyes of Mattie Gokey, a young girl working at a hotel for the summer to earn some money. Mattie collects words ... she picks a word every day and tries to use it. Words to her are incredibly important, and thus the writing style of this book is beautiful to read since the author obviously chose her words carefully. The chapters alternate between "present time" (starting with the finding of a young woman's body) and "a few months before" (with Mattie trying to convince her father to let her work during the summer and to let her go to college in the fall). The author does a great job with her descriptions of life during that time period, and makes you care about her characters. You start to care about what happens to Mattie ... obviously, we know that she did manage to convice her father to let her work at the hotel, but how did she do it? And will she be able to go to college in the fall, or will she get married to "dull but handsome" Royal Loomis? What happened to Grace Brown, and how did she die? Why did she ask Mattie to burn her letters before she died? And will those letters (which Matties doesn't burn) be the key to this mystery?

The book is based on what became the greatest murder mystery of 1906 in the state of New York. It is written in such a beautiful way that you can't put it down ... yet I for one rationed the book to no more than 2 chapters a day to make it last longer because I did not want it to end. It's one of the best books I have read in a long time, and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys well-written books!!! A++