Diane Zinna’s novel, The All-Night Sun, follows Lauren Cress, an English writing teacher at Stella Maris, a small college just outside of Washington D.C., who has dealt with her fair share of tragedy throughout her life. Young and lonely, Lauren takes refuge in an unlikely friendship with Swedish student named Siri. Lauren is aware that the relationship between her and Siri may look odd from the outside, but with everything that has happened to Lauren in her life, she is happy to have found someone who’s story seems to parallel her own. As the school year progresses, so does the friendship between Siri and Lauren and as spring turns to summer, Siri invites Lauren to come back to Sweden to experience one of the most magical times of the year, Midsommar. As Lauren spends her time with Siri in Sweden, she begins to come to terms with the death of her parents and her tragic past all while learning about the darkest parts of herself and her grief that has become a burden her entire life.
The overall theme for The All-Night Sun is grief. The author does an absolutely beautiful job capturing someone who is stuck in their own grief and is unable to find the means to be able to let go and move on. What is so captivating about this is that grief is so different for everyone yet Zinna is able to create Lauren, a character that readers can empathise with and understand the pain she is feeling. Zinna has written The All-Night Sun in first person from Lauren’s perspective and has written this novel in such a way that the reader will find things out when Zinna is ready for the reader to learn about it. Each of the characters in The All-Night Sun are dealing with their own grief and this is beautifully captures just how differently we all feel and experience grief. There’s also a focus on Swedish culture and specifically the celebration of Midsommar and research has clearly been done as Midsommar is described effortlessly while also sprinkling in Swedish words, phrases, and other parts of Swedish culture to make the reader feel like they know exactly what is being described, even if they aren’t sure of what it is themselves. The juxtaposition between grief and the use of Midsommar is brilliant as Zinna puts these two topics side by side to create endlessly exquisite and melancholy scenes with feelings of hope and heartache. Zinna knows exactly how to pull on the reader’s heartstrings.
The All-Night Sun is an ode to grief from beginning to end that Zinna has written both brilliantly and breathtakingly. The author’s powerful prose paints picture after picture for the reader as they make their way through this phenomenal piece of literary fiction. It is clear to the reader the time has been taken to not only do the research about Sweden and Midsommar, but that Zinna has also effortlessly written a story that ebbs and flows so naturally.
It is clear to the reader that The All-Night Sun is a labour of love that Zinna put her entire soul into. Personally, this is the first book in over ten years that had me in tears in the end and not because I was sad, but because of how powerful, gorgeous, and ethereal the entire novel was. I cried because everything came together with precision and poise and I could feel the emotion and tears that Zinna clearly put into this work of art. I cannot wait to see what Zinna writes next, she has instantly become an author that I will automatically buy from when I hear she has written a new novel.
The All-Night Sun is a story that is going to stay with me for a very long time and I hope that I’ve found the right words to do this book justice because it truly is a work of art.
The All-Night Sun is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of July 14th 2020.
Will you be picking up The All-Night Sun? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A lonely young woman gets too close to her charismatic female student in this propulsive debut, culminating in a dangerously debauched Midsommar’s Eve.
“Memorable and meaningful.”—Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Burning Girl
Lauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, DC. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well-liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she could be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that feels to Lauren like she is reclaiming her lost adolescence.
When Siri invites her along on a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren impulsively accepts, intrigued by how Siri describes it: “Everything will be green, fresh, new, just thawing out.” But once there, Lauren finds herself drawn to Siri’s enigmatic, brooding brother Magnus. Siri is resentful, and Lauren starts to see a new side of her friend: selfish, reckless, self-destructive, even cruel. On the last night of her trip, Lauren accompanies Siri and her friends on a seaside camping trip to celebrate Midsommar’s Eve, a night when no one sleeps, boundaries blur, and under the light of the unsetting sun, things take a dark turn.
Ultimately Lauren must acknowledge the truth of what happened with Siri and come to terms with her own tragic past in this gorgeously written, deeply felt debut about the relationships that come to us when things feel darkest–and the transformative power of female friendship.
