"Tell the truth!" It's not just children who get that all the time: Writers do, too. The only difference is that writers don't have to treat the truth too literally, as Jennifer Donnelly shows us in "A Gathering Light."
Donnelly walks the shadow land between fact and fiction in this turn-of-the-century tale based on a real murder that took place in the Adirondack Mountains of northeast New York State. A young woman called Grace Brown checks into the Hotel Glenmore -- where our protagonist, 16-year-old Mattie Gokey works. Then she is found dead in a lake the next day.
In real life, Grace Brown never met anyone by the name of Mattie, but Donnelly doesn't let that stop her from taking the bare bones of the facts and tacking on some fictional meat. In other words, she chooses not to take the truth that literally. It's called "poetic license," or "creative license," and writers use it all the time to tell their stories.