To say that Diane Zinna moved me with her story would not be fair, because it was more than that. She stood above every other book I read this year!! 
She writes about grief with an original way to approach it.
The “All-Night Sun” is a lyrical journey that promises to open your heart! Even open your eyes to new ways of seeing the English language! 
Diane gave words new meanings.
You will see things differently; they’ll be brighter! Whisper louder! Call to you!! Because you’ll notice even the small things...Diane has taught us how to look through life with a new lense of appreciation. 
The world opens up without edges because her story feels so smooth and utterly beautiful!
Let me be blunt - 
This book excited me! I tell everyone about it!! Diane is breathtakingly talented! 
This may be her debut novel, but the essence screams she has been writing successful Literary Fiction novels for years!
I was given a copy of this book by the author in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and Diane Zinna for my copy of The All-Night Sun, for an honest review.  This is my first book by Zinna and it was very good. It is beautifully written and tell the tale of grief and loss like no other. Lauren Cress a teacher of English at a small college, has had a very hard life. She is an orphan, who had to grow up on her own. At the college she has no friends and no real life. During the Spring semester though, she meets a student larger than life, Siri. The two are drawn together for different reasons but a friendship is made. Which puts Lauren’s teaching career at risk. As the semester proceeds Siri asks Lauren to come home to Sweden, during the summer. Lauren should say no but can’t resist the idea of a trip, with a friend to a place she has never been. The trip and the summer in Sweden isn’t all that Lauren thinks it will be. As with most people Siri has her own ghosts. Will this trip be the end of the friendship or the beginning. Will it bring Lauren peace or unhappiness? This was a 4 star read for me. I did feel s as times it was slow going. Although it was supposed to be sad at points, there could have been more happiness. Just my humble opinion. All in all it is a very well written book, character development was solid and it ended the way it needed to. I have recommended this to friends and family. I have also recommended this on my Instagram account. She my review on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I am glad I got a copy of this one, it definitely made me think.

I did not enjoy this one sadly. It did not hold my attention. I may just not have been in the right place at the time to properly read and enjoy this book.

This book is full of unresolved grief and the slippery slope of tragedy/emotions not acknowledged. While most will relate to some aspect (jealousy between friends, family estrangement, loneliness), this is not a smooth or straight ride. The twists encountered as the truth is revealed will keep the reader feverishly turning pages.

I can certainly appreciate this book and why it has been met with so many wonderful reviews. Unfortunately it just wasn't for me. It was a little too slow, and left me feeling as though it could have been 100 or so pages shorter. The writing is very lyrical, and that can often be hit or miss for me, and unfortunately I just couldn't click with this one at all.

Lauren Cress is a charismatic professor that is liked well enough by her students. But she also harbors a lot of grief and depression as both of her parents were killed in a car accident, leaving her alone in the world. She quickly becomes close to one of her students, Siri, and they have an all-consuming (perhaps inappropriate) relationship. When she travels to Siri’s home in Sweden, Lauren quickly becomes entangled with Siri’s and her friends’ lives.

With themes of female friendship, grief, and loneliness, I was instantly sucked into this debut novel by Diane Zinna. She is a powerful storyteller that nailed the angst and mystery that keeps a reader interested. Admittedly, this book will be too slow-paced for some readers, but I personally found the writing and experience to be captivating and mesmerizing. Reminiscent of Marlena, Zinna flawlessly nails the unsettling and mysterious undertone and I was compelled to find out what happened as fast as possible.

I am on the fence about this one. At times I really enjoyed it and the style of writing and at other times I found the descriptiveness and use of metaphors to be a bit too much. I was also confused at times wondering what was real with Lauren and what was not. I did enjoy the aspects relating to Sweden, a country I have never been to but the author did provide a vivid picture of it. I also love the cover, that's what initially drew me in! 

Overall, if you love a descriptive and atmospheric type of book then you may enjoy this one :)

Let’s talk gorgeous covers... What covers come to mind for you?? {#partner @randomhouse}⁣
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I think 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘼𝙡𝙡-𝙉𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙎𝙪𝙣 is one of the most beautiful book covers I’ve seen in a LONG time. It’s up there with 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘱! 😍😍⁣
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“𝘚𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘮𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘮, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘰𝘸𝘯, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭-𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘶𝘴, 𝘢 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥.”⁣
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Unfortunately, the inside of this one didn’t quite live up to the outside for me. It just wasn’t the right book for my mood this month. It is quieter, slower, and extremely character driven. None of those are bad things, but require the right reading frame of mind, which I was not in. It took me two weeks to finish, since I never felt pulled towards it. I was glad I saw it through because the story as a whole was worth it, but for me this was 3/5 stars. ⁣
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“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.”⁣
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This is a debut novel for Diane Zinna, and I think she did an excellent job tackling what it’s like to swim through the depths of grief. It just didn’t fit my mood this month.

THE ALL-NIGHT SUN is a lyrical, pretty book about loss, inappropriate friendships, and Sweden. I enjoyed it, but it dragged a lot and could have probably been about 30% shorter. Also, after seeing the film MIDSOMMER last year (and being absolutely haunted by it since) it was hard not to compare the two and unfortunately, while this book has its climax take place at a midsommer festival, it just didn’t have the fireworks I think I was expecting (and perhaps, a super dark twist).

Instead, the book is about an English professor, Lauren, who becomes enamored with one of her students Siri, who is an international student from Sweden. Lauren is lonely and alone in life after a tragic accident that took both parents 10 years earlier, and she gloms onto Siri in a strange and, while not romantic, somewhat obsessive way. Siri eventually takes her to Sweden where things seems mysterious, and Lauren falls for her brother Magnus, but not too much happens (though we learn a lot about Sweden!) I liked the writing a lot, but given the fact that it felt like a slog and the action was lacking, I have to give it two stars.

During the summer in southern Sweden, the sky never goes fully black at night; it only dims to a twilight glow for a few hours. The sun does dip below the horizon, unlike in the north and above the Arctic Circle, where it shines in the sky for 24 hours a day. The light contributes to a general sense of otherworldliness, creating a place without night, where nothing can remain fully hidden in the dark—if only for a few months. Ari Aster’s hit film Midsommar capitalized on this otherworldliness, incorporating Swedish folk customs, language, and geography into its psychological horror. Diane Zinna’s new novel The All-Night Sun, dreamed up nearly a decade before Aster’s film and released July 14, tells a similar story: A lost young woman goes on a trip to a friend’s hometown in Sweden to find herself in the wake of her parents’ tragic deaths; she takes hallucinogenic drugs on the night of the summer solstice and chaos ensues. But here, the surrealism—and the horror—comes from the way grief warps the passage of time and one’s sense of self.

Before she goes to Sweden, Lauren Cress is a 28-year-old adjunct professor at a fictional Catholic college outside D.C., teaching international students English composition. In that class, she meets 18-year-old Siri Bergström, who quickly becomes more than her student. Like Lauren, Siri lost both her parents, and she senses “in Siri’s gaze that she knew the parts I’d left unsaid.” There’s much inside Lauren that is unsaid. Since her parents died in an accident when she was 18, she’s been more of a shell than a fully realized person, floating through life without purpose or real connection beyond the men she sometimes brings home to feel something. Siri ignites a passion inside Lauren that looks, and acts, much like romance. Soon they spend all their time together, on campus and in Lauren’s apartment. When the semester’s nearly over and Siri invites Lauren to come to her home over the summer, she jumps at the chance, her career an afterthought. 

So far, Lauren has only seen Siri in love-bomb mode, all sweetness and light, but in her hometown she shows a more petulant, cruel, and capricious side to friends and family who are already under her spell. At times, Siri is downright childish, which seems to shock Lauren, but she is, after all, a child. Soon, Lauren experiences that cruelty for herself, and what happens on that brief trip changes her forever. Although only about half the novel is set there, Sweden is a far more vividly imagined setting than any American place, including the book’s hazy and imprecise Long Island and D.C. locales. Its geography is specific and accurate, perhaps reflecting how Lauren is more alive there than she ever was at home. 

Like many works of fiction that deal with—in a phrase—complicated female friendships, The All-Night Sun depends heavily on tropes of sexual and romantic obsession, but the novel and its narrator coyly refuse to plumb those depths. If Zinna is aware of the resonance, Lauren seems not to be. She at least knows that her attraction to Siri crosses teacher-student boundaries; she encourages Siri and her family not to tell anyone at the college about her trip and she fully unravels when, after tragedy, her colleagues find out she went. When one mentions “inappropriate behavior,” Lauren wonders if Siri’s friend said she’d “harassed” her student, although no one else has used the word harassment. Later, while staring at a painting by Siri’s older brother Magnus where Lauren and Siri are naked, she’s all too aware of “the incrimination of their nudity.” When Lauren has sex with Magnus, both she and Siri understand that it is a betrayal of their relationship. But Siri is always “a friend,” until she becomes another ghost haunting Lauren.

Lauren is hard for a reader to hold on to, even with all her rough edges, but that’s because there’s very little keeping her together. It can be frustrating at times, but the wandering narration and her increasingly foggy mental state feel true to the mind-numbing, almost supernatural effects of grief—it sends her time traveling into the past, conjures up ghosts, and creates alternate universes. Only by confronting it can she break its spell and consider the kind of person she can be going forward, or consider that she has a future at all. Ultimately, what’s illuminated by the summer sun and Santa Lucia’s candles in The All-Night Sun is the thorny, surreal nature of grief, both new and old, and the twisting path forward after loss.

I'm quite sure I won't be the only reader to have been interested in this due to its apparent resemblance to the film "Midsommar." Unfortunately "The All-Night Sun" has a problem in the shape of its protagonist Lauren, who is intolerably annoying and behaves more like a teenager than her students, who actually *are* teens. I don't believe that characters need to be "likeable" at all, but it doesn't really seem we are supposed to see her that way nor is there any explanation of it. my impatience with Lauren made this book a frustrating read.

When I first saw The All-Night Sun, I didn't care what the book was about because I was in love with the cover. Wow! Truly gorgeous. The story is an amazing book that had me captivated. It is beautifully written and a haunting look at life overwhelmed by loneliness and grief. It was a very moving story. I'm excited to see what Diane Zinna comes up with next.

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.