I have a hard time rating this book: The first half of The All-Night Sun felt slow and confusing. It was difficult to even sort of empathize with any of the characters or to understand their motivations, although the beautiful descriptions really made me want to go to Sweden. The last quarter or so of the novel, I felt a pivot, and while I still think the narrator was unrealistically naive, I would rate this book much higher for the last section of the book, where Zinna's reflections on grief and friendships really shine through.

After a few attempts, I finally finished this novel. It is a slow starter that never really picks up speed. There is a bit of a twist toward the end, but, overall, I cannot recommend this one, personally.

wow wow wow,
this book was so touching. though I rarely (never) cry at books with this one I came pretty close.

this tells a wonderfully written story of grief, loss and love in a very unfair world.

highly recommend to everyone

WHAT IS (AND ISN’T) HELD IN THE LIGHT: DIANE ZINNA’S THE ALL-NIGHT SUN
REVIEWED BY HOLLY M. WENDT

September 9th, 2020, TheRumpus.net

“A word can be like a cellar door. Just a few steps and you’re in a dark place.”

In the brisk September of 2007 when I walked the grassy flat of Stora Alvaret, I was looking for graves, if not expressly ghosts. The alvar is a low, dry plain on the southern end of the Swedish island of Öland, dotted with stone ships and other Iron Age funeral commemorations, and it was these I was researching, trying to pull together threads distant from me for a graduate school project. When Lauren Cress, the protagonist of Diane Zinna’s captivating debut novel The All-Night Sun, walks the same landscape of rough-hewn stone and long-stilled windmills, she’s caught in a net knotted by both the living and the dead.

John Gardner had an old saw about plots—that there are only two, and in one, someone goes on a journey, and in the other, a stranger comes to town—which is to say that maybe there’s only one plot and a choice of point of view. But any plot in the right hands can work its magic on a reader. Zinna’s novel deftly weaves together the premise of the journey and the stranger through the long light of Sweden’s Midsommar and the deep shadow of grief.

The novel’s central action is deceptively simple—mild-mannered adjunct professor takes ill-advised trip with a student—but its execution is gripping from the start, aptly rooted in the power of storytelling. Lauren first meets Siri, a Swedish college student in Lauren’s composition class for international students, through the tales Siri tells about her home.

In essays, Siri had written about this place imbued with magic: trolls; water spirits; the holiday called Midsommar, when everyone flees the cities for the countryside, when everyone turns young again. Midsommar, when the sun didn’t set and night’s torments didn’t come. Really? She’d agreed, yes, it was that green, that fresh, that new—everything would just be thawing out.

In Lauren’s first-person narration, her hunger for such a place is palpable—for a place where magic can still happen, for the idea of beginnings, for any kind of respite from her grief. After her parents die in a car accident when Lauren is only just legally an adult, leaving her utterly alone, the pall of their deaths drapes everything. She has no extended family, no friends close enough or old enough to help her wade these waters. She notices very quickly the way her truth affects others, so she alters it or omits it entirely through the next ten years of her life, shaping her story according to the cantilever of others’ expectations, even at her own expense:

When I met new people, I did not tell them about it. The nature of my parents’ deaths made it hard for me to talk about. The idea of their drowning in a car—I feared that by sharing it, the image would continue to live in other people’s minds. And they’d want to say something, but what can someone say? The car would just rev and dive in the strangers’ thoughts, and they’d be left on the bridge without a clue of how to respond to me. I came to believe the most polite thing to do was let the memory of it die inside me. And part of me started to die away with it.

Lauren’s fixation on images leads her to idealize her landscapes, which Zinna handles with striking precision and transportive beauty. The small liberal arts college where Lauren teaches is sculpted, well-planted: “its alcoves filled with art, bronze plaques fastened to the corners of white buildings, hedges cut into the shapes of animals.” There are roses, endless varieties, and walking paths, a place that, in its order and structure and community, creates a scaffold on which Lauren hopes to build: “I liked to think that at some point Stella Maris could feel like a family.” By allowing the college to impose its expectations on her—a facsimile of peace and orderliness—Lauren is able to think, at another moment of loneliness, “Having [the roses’] names inside me made it easier when that boyfriend moved on again in three months’ time.”

When Siri appears, and in her words, Sweden, with all its textures and colors and folklore, has scaffolding that only appears sturdier. But it’s a frame that showcases another sense of loss: the way in which Lauren has been robbed of the young adult life she watches her students experience. The students’ presence highlights absence, amplifying Lauren’s unmooredness—too old and too much in a position of authority, as a teacher, to be properly within her students’ sphere; too young, too contingent to fit with other faculty—and Zinna’s narrator meets that omnipresent sense of absence with longing more than cynicism, an aching tenderness that is the gentlest kind of ravenousness. And so when Lauren discovers this stranger, Siri, also bears a similar burden of grief, it is inevitable that she will accept the friendship and the attendant journey Siri offers, no matter that it might cost her position, any hope of professional advancement.

The novel opens with a prologue in a kind of compressed time, which serves as an introduction to Siri, yes, but also an introduction to the trip and its final, shattering days. Just as present is the Swedish landscape whose bright magic—in Siri’s tellings—is catalyst to so many things. Lauren and Siri and Siri’s friends—all of whom are a decade younger than Lauren—go to a beach on the northern end of Öland called Neptuni Åkrar.

Neptuni Åkrar is a rocky shore punctuated by long, low slabs of indigo-gray stone revealed and hidden by the tide. Here is where, on my trip years ago, I dipped my fingers into the Baltic and brought them to my mouth, hoping that the salt water would help me understand the place, its history. In The All-Night Sun, it is at Neptuni Åkrar—Neptune’s beach—that it becomes clear to Lauren that there is altogether too much she doesn’t understand, that there are choices Siri demands she make that feel impossible, whether because of their differences in age, their differing attitudes toward Siri’s brother Magnus, or the way their griefs spark against each other. Still there is an undercurrent of beauty at every turn, a desperation to want the illusion offered by the place. Of that moment, later in the novel, Lauren says, “It had become so easy to believe in magic by then. I’d seen it and felt it in the places we’d been; in words, in light, and then that morning, in the inky flowers that bloomed in the water at Neptuni Åkrar, where Siri, Karin, and Frida’s blond hair all took on just the slightest tinge of blue from swimming.”

The depth of Lauren and Siri’s hunger for each other—for love, for friendship—is especially magnetic because it is a relationship that is not sexualized. Not only is this a refreshing departure from the bulk of professor-student interactions in literature, it speaks with powerful honesty about loneliness and connection. Lauren and Siri’s interactions are even partially framed in opposition to sexual attraction—Siri’s insistence that Lauren not get involved with her brother Magnus; Lauren’s fear when, on Öland, Siri accepts an invitation to go off with a strange man—and demonstrates an even more fraught intimacy: one that accepts and even enables their mutual web of partial truths. When it becomes clear that Lauren has told a fictionalized iteration of her parents’ deaths in a classroom exercise, Lauren says, of Siri, “She didn’t think it was peculiar that I had lied. She skipped right to understanding that—what? That there are sometimes reasons we don’t tell the whole truth.”

In the novel, the telling of a story becomes more important than the facts of it. When Siri talks about her brother’s art in contrast to her own, the way their visual remembrances of their mother have put them at odds, Siri says, “All I was doing there was trying to tell my own version of things, fix what he did.” In the story, there is power—beautifully true of the book itself—and the other stories inside the novel have power over the characters, particularly the mythological trappings of Sweden.

Siri, in an essay for class, writes about Odin’s ravens, Huginn and Muninn, the black birds of thought and memory, and it’s memory that pecks at Lauren, not only of her parents’ passing and all of her attendant failures thereafter, but the conclusion of the trip itself, its aftermath. Trauma’s wing conceals and reveals. Mythological beings like Näcken and Skogsrå—both dangerous figures luring the tempted lover to their doom in water or woods—provide evocative, terrifying anchor points and situate the work still more firmly in place while showing how readily, even greedily, Lauren absorbs what is given her. Zinna’s use of these details productively unsettles the narrative; the broken truths in the characters’ mouths are as unstable as the ground Siri’s brother Magnus literally breaks to bury his paintings. There is blurring between the monstrous and the metaphorical, the literal and the figurative, especially as the characters careen toward the climax on Öland. In a novel centered on connection and understanding, every character is, or becomes, someone else’s stranger, and the effect is mesmerizing.

Diane Zinna’s The All-Night Sun holds, at its heart, illumination: what is shown, what is held in the light, which is also to say that what is hidden, what is kept in shadow, is also necessarily part of its project. The All-Night Sun does not disappoint; the interplay between the secrets the characters keep and their moments of revelatory intimacy create a striking chiaroscuro effect that is as much about the power of storytelling—its power to deceive and transgress as much as to soothe and heal—as it is about what and how we grieve.

I'm going to come right out and start by saying that I LOVED this book. There were so many quotes and sentences throughout that were so beautiful and cut to the bone. One example is this sentence: “A word can be like a cellar door. Just a few steps and you're in a dark place.” I chose this one because I feel like it captures so much of this book of grief, loneliness, and unresolved trauma,

Simply, The All-Night Sun is one of the most haunting and beautifully written books I've read in a long time.

So, a simple summary of the story, as I never like to ruin anything for the next reader: Lauren's parents were killed in a car crash when she was 18. She works her way through college and ends up teaching creative writing at a small university just outside of Washington DC. She is popular with her students, but always a sort of separate entity from everyone else. She especially connects with a Swedish student Siri who seems to be kind, empathetic, and free-spirited. When Siri invites Lauren on a trip to Sweden during Midsommar activities, Lauren begins to see a darker side of Siri. This was a very realistic novel of how friendships can control your life. I also found it achingly relatable as we have all had a friend that we thought was perfect and then had to take off the rose-colored glasses and face that they weren't- because none of us are.

Lauren is planning to travel with Siri. She is a teacher. I liked the characters and feel. I liked the dialogue.

Truly a haunting and beautifully written story of a young woman in deep pain and grief. Not what I would turn to if I was having a sad day but a lovely book full of depth and real old fashioned, first person character study.

“Grief can feel like homesickness.” Diane Zinna writes. This searing and lyrical novel tackles hard themes of complicated friendship, self-destruction, remorse, and betrayal. This book starts with binds formed in mutual loss: "...I sensed more deeply what had drawn Siri and me together: not just the loss of our parents, but the family stories never finished..."

But we quickly learn that this is not a fluffy beach read. The story bleeds with self-loathing, secrets, and regret.

"I think back to the stories the women in my family told, and they were always about women like this, who ruin things."

Yet I wouldn't call our wounded narrator unlikeable or inscrutable. Rather. she is deeply wounded, lonely, searching for connection. It's a complicated book but one worth reading. I've definitely not read anything similar.

I tried to push through this one but just couldn't reconcile the floweriness of the writing with the ickiness of the plot and the protagonist. I DNF'd at 55%.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Lauren, a young woman, is teaching in a prestigious school. She befriends one of her students and travels with the girl, Siri, over summer break. In their friendship, she crosses lines of professionalism and creates problems in her life.

A beautiful and painful book. The story of a troubled young professor and her intense friendship with a Swedish international student.

Traveling with her student, Lauren finds herself entangled with the student’s friends and older artist brother. Zinna writes sentences that can take you from the highest highs to the lowest lows in a few words.

Admittedly, I did feel that the Midsommer setting was a little too...."Midsommer' the movie. With that weird space between sleep and awake, with not knowing if things are real or a dream.

Still, this book is wonderful. .

The All-Night Sun is not what I was expecting. I'm not sure what it was about the synopsis that had me confused, but I'll include my own below just in case you had the same experience.

Lauren lost both her parents in an accident when she was just 18 years old. She had no other family or support system and as a new adult had no life experience to deal with their sudden deaths and the responsibilities left in their wake. Lauren was unmoored and completely alone. Where The All-Night Sun begins ten years have passed and Lauren is working as an adjunct professor teaching english comp to international students at a small Catholic college. Despite the years, Lauren has never had a serious relationship—only short encounters with passing men—nor even a close friendship. She desperately seeks connection with her first year students until Siri, an 18 year old Swedish exchange student, ends up in her class and they form an intense emotional connection. When Siri invites Lauren to come back to Sweden with her over summer break she accepts despite the huge professional risk.

What I loved most about this book was the writing itself. The prose is lovely, being both lyrical and melancholy. More than anything I loved the descriptions of nature which just sparkled on the page. Especially at the beginning, I felt I could highlight the whole thing.

This started with a good sense of suspense. I loved the dreamlike unease that fills the pages. There's almost an Alice's Adventures in Wonderland quality where things are just not how to thought you knew them to be. Unfortunately, I felt it was ultimately undermined by its own pacing. It started strong with its beautiful prose and anticipation and—to a lesser extent—ended strong. However, there was a good while in the middle that failed to keep my interest. This is not a complaint of being "slow," a quality I generally quite like, but of a lack of progress and development. Similarly, the lyricism I loved so much at the beginning seemed to take a backseat as the story progressed, something that would have kept my attention despite being otherwise uneventful.

This is, by no means, a bad book. In many ways it's quite lovely and there is a lot to enjoy about it, and I definitely did (not to mention that cover.) But I do feel that it might have been better served with some further editing down.

Review // The All-Night Sun by Diane Zinna
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The Facts: Literary Fiction, Debut Novel
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The Feel: Haunting, Compelling, Descriptive, Complex, Brilliant
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The Focus: Lauren is grieving the sudden death of her parents, who were her only real family. Working as an adjunct professor in DC, she meets a student named Siri, who is also dealing with the death of her mother. Lauren clings to Siri for hope and support, eventually accompanying her home to Sweden for a debauched Midsommar festival. This is ultimately a study in grief, loneliness and consequences.
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Things To Know:
🇸🇪 I've finally found it - my favorite book of 2020! I know I say this a lot, but this really was the most beautiful book I've read in a very long time. Zinna's writing is incredible - smooth, descriptive, vivid, gutteral. As soon as I started reading, I was in it, traveling to Sweden, swirling around in Lauren's anguish, wondering how I would possibly get by in a similar situation. I couldn't put it down.
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🇸🇪 I've never read a book that so perfectly and hauntingly captured grief. I felt it in the pit of my stomach. I cried more than once. I wanted to reach through the pages and hug Lauren, take her in and protect her. This is a story of loss and yearning, for family and home, for a place to belong. It's a story about spiraling into obsession. It's a story about how hurt people hurt people. It's incredibly sad and incredibly brilliant.
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🇸🇪 As always, I loved how immersive and escapist this book was. I love to travel far and wide through the stories I read, experiencing as many countries and cultures as possible. I was right there in Sweden, exploring the underground art, making flower crowns, watching the sun finally start to set at 11:00 p.m. Siri's siblings and home life were fascinating, as was the truly debauched Midsommar festival they attend on the last night of Lauren's trip.
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Read If You Like:
🇸🇪 Midsommar (without the horror)
🇸🇪 The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
🇸🇪 Complex character studies
🇸🇪 Catharsis
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I'm still shocked that this was a debut. Brilliant and beautiful. ALL THE STARS!! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Question: What lengths will main character Lauren go to escape her painful truths? Answers: Across an ocean and from start to finish of this gorgeously wrought novel. Lauren is a lonely, lonely soul seeking a bridge to connect her to anyone -- anyone. Yet her debilitation stems from a tragedy involving a bridge. She seeks the consolation of family, yet her only family have left her alone. When Lauren secretly (and inappropriately, in the eyes of her colleagues) accompanies one of her students home for the summer, the trip from DC-area private college to Sweden at mid-summer is by turns lavish and destitute. Diane Zinna uses language and imagery to such exquisite effect. How does a lonely soul like Lauren disentangle herself from all the lies and ghosts she's lived with for so long? There's surely a lyrical Swedish word for the lovely way Zinna guides us to that answer.

[Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.]

Love in the spring , like love in the summer is new fresh, untried and always true. This is the case of a young woman ,an adjunct at a cross roads of discovery when a young woman named Siri comes to her class. What begins in class is continued to Sweden ,Siri’s safe place. Hoping to share in those rare early moments in relationships the joy of new places,a foreign language and a world familiar to one and eye opening to another. There is plenty of angst to go around,but the beauty of life and the unbidden cruelty of death is captured here with a poetry and resolve well worth the time. Happy reading

Many thanks to Netgalley and publishers for this review copy.

I was so engrossed with Zinna’s The All-Night Sun. It’s beautifully written and tells a story of love and loss. I could feel Lauren’s lonesomeness and her hope for this new friendship with Siri. I found myself relating badly to Lauren;, how a new friendship gave her so much hope for an improvement in her life and the possibility she could come to terms with her parents’ death.

I am completely wowed by the writing and Zinna’s ability to make me feel so much.

Hauntingly beautiful and raw. In The All-Night Sun, Diane Zinna courageously explores themes of tragedy, loss, grief, survival, friendship, and the complexities that go with each. Some parts were hard for me to read because Zinna explores the ways our minds try to protect our hearts during times of grief in such an honest and visceral way that it took my breath away and stirred my heart. The characters are layered and flawed, in a sometimes cruel world, reaching out to find comfort in one another in their own way. Lauren, the main character, is broken and alone in a broken world - never having got over her parent's tragic death. I loved getting to know more about the Swedish culture and traditions in this book. My favorite quote was: "Thank God we have others to help us remember. But you know, even if all of this washed away tomorrow, it would all be okay. It would all still be written on the heart of God."
Zinna brings the story to a riveting and satisfying conclusion.


Thank you to Netgalley for an early reader copy. My opinion is my own.

Siri Bergström and Lauren Cress became close friends at Stella Maris, a small college outside Washington DC where Siri is a 19-yr old freshman from Sweden, and Lauren is her 28-yr old teacher. Both have run away from their tragic home lives, are lost and lonely, and obsessed with each other. Lauren grew up in Long Island, where her parents died when she was 18, leaving her all alone and unprepared for anything. Her yearning for family and belonging and being known is as tangible as her awkwardness and impropriety are glaring. She has deep shame about the scars on her back that have something to do with promiscuity. Siri has run away from her brother Magnus over differences regarding the death of their mother. Everything comes to a head as Lauren travels to Sweden over summer break with Siri, where their secrets and allegiances tear them apart.

"Is it the English teacher in you that thinks everything can be fixed with words? Sometimes it's just enough to be around people who loved the same person you loved."

The story of college professor Lauren and student Siri is complicated, unexpected and all-consuming. Their friendship takes both by surprise and builds throughout the first semester together. As they journey together to Siri's home in Sweden their friendship is tested and torn through a series of events with Siri's family and friends - secrets, traditions and sorrows.

This book gripped me from the first chapter. It was a spell-binding as I consumed it at a feverish pace. It consumed me. Lauren's haunting image of loss, tragedy, friendship and forgiveness will stay will me a very long time. As beautiful as the cover is, the story inside lives up to the colors and detail displayed.

Diane Zinna's debut novel is fantastic. I will auto-buy her next one. All the feels.

From the moment I picked up The All Night Sun by Diane Zinna, I felt like I was in a fever dream - unsure what was real, what was imagined and not entirely sure how to sift between the two. Don’t worry, it became (mostly) clear eventually but that dreamy quality stuck with me throughout the novel. Lauren Cress is an adjunct professor at a small college outside of DC, she teaches writing to international students and considers herself a great teacher simply because she truly listens to and cares about the students. Not yet 30 herself, she’s young and can relate to the students she’s teaching, and forms a close bond with Siri, a charismatic Swedish student. When Siri invites her to come home with her for a few weeks over the summer, Lauren doesn’t hesitate, and we find ourselves in Sweden in the sun-drenched weeks leading up to Midsommar’s Eve.

Lauren, who lost both her parents in a tragic accident at 18 years old, struggles personally and professionally to connect with others and to find footing in the world around her. Siri, a fellow orphan, throws her a lifeline and the two connect and bond in a way that Lauren hadn’t been able to in the ten years since she lost her parents. Siri welcomes Lauren into the bosom of her family, and sharing intimate details of her growing up. The climax of the novel is an ill-fated camping trip to celebrate Midsommar at the end of Lauren’s visit to Sweden, the night before she’s due to depart the country. The second half of the novel follows Lauren’s return to teaching and the eventual fall-out from the camping trip, details of which trickle out in fits and spurts as Lauren recalls more and more about the evening, months later.

A story of loneliness, grief and the power that trauma can have on our minds and emotions, I was equally frustrated by Lauren’s character and devastated for her and the many losses she had experienced from such a young age. How could I judge her actions when I couldn’t even begin to relate to such a loss? Zinna paints an extraordinary portrait of Sweden in the height of summer when the sun sets for just a few hours before rising again and captures Lauren’s loneliness with poignancy. There were points in the novel when I wanted so desperately to reach through and hug Lauren and help her along to find her way. She tackles the often thorny subject of female friendship and its many forms and the difficulties it can pose, but also how it can build women up and bolster them against the world.