Title and cover - kiana

A Gathering Light Study guide

Title and cover The title "A Gathering Light" is an interesting title for this book and is rather difficult to see its significance. Rather than it being directly obvious and telling us what the book is about, it is more seen as a metaphor for the journey of Mattie and her strive to achieve her dreams of going to college and and "gathering" information from Grace Brown's letters relating to her murder. The end of the story symbolises the "light" or "light at the end of the tunnel" when Mattie resolves not only her problem of getting to university and hoping to achieve her dreams, but she also did many other things for the people around her.She gave Most of the money she had earned working for Miss Wilcox and at the Glenmore Hotel to her Pa and Weaver's Mother to go towards things they needed; towards a donkey for her father and to pay off the bills on Emmie Hubbard's house. She also gave some of her money to Weaver so he could get to University too and left Royal Loomis for the best. She finally came to a realisation that she would have to leave to go to college and make a life for herself before its took late unlike Grace Brown.

The book was originally called "A Northern Light" but was changed because the title was to similar the famous novel "Northern Lights" by Phillip Pullman. This title also applies very similarly to the novel as the current title has, but you can interpret as being set somewhere in the North and when you read the story you know that it is set in the far North of North America.

Cover by our group: As a group, we thought of different ideas to use on the front cover and we found that the first idea worked the best in terms of representing what the story was about as well as working with the title.

Illustrated by me, the front cover has a few images on it; a pile of books, a letter, key and a fountain pen. These objects are interpreted more as you read the book more, all being associated with the main character Mattie Gokey as she reads Grace Brown's letters trying to find the "key" to what caused her death, and the fact that she loves books and wants to write her own literature, starting with her composition books and fountain pen her uncle gave her.

The font I used was similar to that of the one used on the original Northern Light cover which seemed to be a very appropriate and suiting font.