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Summary
Summary
A "richly imagined and darkly comic" (Jenny Offill) love story set in the Arctic Circle that explores self-discovery and the power of starting over. Now a major motion picture, starring Jenny Slate, Gillian Anderson, Zach Galifianakis, and Alex Sharp.
22-year-old Frances has fled heartbreak and claustrophobic Manhattan for an isolated artist colony in the beautiful, barren landscape of northern Norway. Yasha, a Russian immigrant raised in a bakery in Brooklyn, travels to Norway to fulfill his beloved father's last wish: to be buried "at the top of the world." Both have come to learn how to be alone. But under the ever-present midnight sun, Frances and Yasha are surprised to find refuge in each other, instead.
Ninety-five miles north of the Arctic Circle, the two form a bond that fortifies them against the turmoil of their distant homes, offering solace amidst great uncertainty. With nimble and sure-footed prose enriched with humor and warmth, Dinerstein reveals that no matter how far we travel to claim our own territory, it is ultimately love that gives us our place in the world.
Author Notes
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novels Hex and The Sunlit Night , the screenplay for The Sunlit Night --now a major motion picture starring Jenny Slate--and a collection of poems, Lofoten . Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker online, among others. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in New Hampshire. Follow her on Twitter @beckydinerstein. www.rebeccadinerstein.com
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Dinerstein's captivating debut novel, an isolated island above the Arctic Circle is the setting for two people trying to surmount grief and find love. After being jilted by her boyfriend, 21-year-old Frances flees Manhattan to apprentice with a laconic Norwegian artist in a remote community called Lofoten, where she learns to adjust to the unending daylight of a Scandinavian summer. Meanwhile, Yasha Gregoriov, five years Frances's junior, comes there to bury his father, Vassily, a Russian immigrant to the U.S. whose wish was to be interred in a peaceful place "at the top of the world." Both Frances and Yasha are products of dysfunctional families. Frances's parents bicker continually and use their high-minded principles to try to destroy the engagement of Sarah, Frances's sister. Yasha's mother, gorgeous Olyana, abandoned Yasha and Vassily, the kindly proprietor of a Brooklyn bakery, a decade earlier. Dinerstein (author of Lofoten, a bilingual English-Norwegian poetry collection) writes of these domestic situations with humor and compassion. Her prose is lyrical and silky, but it's also specific, with acute observations and precise detail, and she evokes the sun-stroked, barren Norwegian landscape with a striking sense of place. Her descriptions of Yasha's grief and of the tentative love affair between Frances and Yasha are palpable with loss and yearning. With provocative insights about the cruelty of abandonment, the concept of home, and the limits of parental and filial love, Dinerstein's novel is a rich reading experience. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Union Literary. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
At the very top of the world, two lonely outsiders find comfort in each other in Dinerstein's deliciously melancholy debut. After her college relationship predictably disintegrates, 21-year-old Frances, an aspiring artist, accepts an apprenticeship at the Viking Museum in Lofoten, a string of islands 95 miles above the Arctic Circle in Norway, trading in a summer watching her parents' marriage unravel for a summer learning to paint all-yellow murals under the tutelage of the strong and silent Nils. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Yasha and his beloved baker-father, Vassily ("if the Danishes are sour, one babka on me"), gleefully ditch their home in Brighton Beach to take a summer trip back to the motherland. But the trip, such as it was, ends in tragedy, and Yasha, too, finds himself in Lofoten, now unmoored and unattached. And so Frances and Yashaunited by their separate losses, united by being the sorts of people who deal with those losses by building new and inherently temporary lives at an Arctic Viking Museumfall into an unlikely kind of romance. Dinerstein's writing is light and lyrical, and her descriptions of the far north are intoxicating. Yasha and Frances and the cast of sitcom-ready Norwegian misfits who staff the museum are engaging and sad and quirky, if not particularly substantial. It hardly matters, though, because the heart and soul of the novel belongs to the fathers: Yasha's father, with his bakery and his deep optimism and his broken heart, and Frances' father, a colossally talented medical illustrator who, in late middle age, seems to be methodically disassembling the life he's built. As the rest of the novel fades into memory, it's the fathers, in their supporting roles, who linger long after the last page. A poetic premise with language to match. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Twenty-one-year-old Frances loses her bearings when her boyfriend dismisses her, her parents decide to separate, and her younger sister announces she is leaving their Manhattan home to get married. Since departing Russia 10 years ago, 17-year-old Yasha and his father, Vassily, have lived above and worked in a bakery in Brighton Beach, hoping that Yasha's mother will join them. The two narratives start to converge when Frances and Yasha both find themselves in Norway, just north of the Arctic Circle. Frances has come to an artists' colony to work as an apprentice to a Norwegian painter who uses only the color yellow. Yasha has come to fulfill his now-dead father's final wish to be buried at the top of the world (the Viking Museum adjacent to the artists' colony has agreed to host Vassily's funeral). Frances and Yasha fall in love in this strange and isolated place, where the sun never sets during the summer months, and the museum and its staff provide a temporary home. Vivid characters and locales, a buoyant prose style, and a slightly off-kilter sensibility make Dinerstein's first novel shine.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE FULL CATASTROPHE: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins, by James Angelos, (Broadway, $16.) To understand Greece's current financial crisis, look to its full history, not just reports of endemic corruption and dysfunction, Angelos argues here. Competing images of Greece - as both a birthplace of Western culture and modern floundering state - have exacerbated tensions between the country and the rest of Europe. THE ARCHITECT'S APPRENTICE, by Elif Shafak. (Penguin, $17.) During the Ottoman Empire, a young boy from India studies under the sultan's chief architect and helps to construct some of the region's most magnificent structures: the Suleimaniye and Selimiye mosques. Shafak's novel captures the era's richly textured social fabric and functions as "a love poem to the cosmopolitan beauty of Istanbul," our reviewer, Christopher Atamian, said here. YOUNG ELIOT: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land," by Robert Crawford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) This biography traces the influences of Eliot's Midwestern upbringing on his writing years after he moved to his adopted home, England. Crawford "has done exceptional spadework in turning up clues that take us deeper into Eliot's symbolic landscapes, often rooted in childhood," David Yezzi wrote here. THE ANCHORESS, by Robyn Cadwallader. (Picador, $16.) In this novel, it's 1255 England and 17-year-old Sarah, fleeing indignities and violence in the secular world, has chosen to cloister herself in a small cell in her village's church. From her room, she learns to balance the outside world's influence with her interior life as she deepens her relationship with God, and wrestles with the fraught relationship between piety and gender. I AM SORRY TO THINK I HAVE RAISED A TIMID SON, by Kent Russell. (Vintage, $16.) Russell's essay collection forms a pointillistic portrait of American masculinity, including dispatches from its extremes - Russell writes about Juggalos, Amish people who love baseball and a snake handler - and his own experience. As an outlier in a military family, Russell is often at odds with his father as they spar over competing ideas of what it means to be a man. THE SUNLIT NIGHT, by Rebecca Dinerstein. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Both Yasha and Frances have fled to the far reaches of an Arctic archipelago: He, a Russian immigrant living in Brighton Beach, came to bury his father, while Frances sought refuge from her family and ex-boyfriend, armed with a desire to paint. The novel follows them as they forge a bond while grappling with their losses. INDEPENDENCE LOST: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, by Kathleen DuVal. (Random House, $18.) Eight representative historical figures shed light on the American battle for independence on the Gulf Coast. African-Americans, Native Americans, Irish immigrants and Cajuns all contributed to the area's fight, which was the site of some important British defeats.
Library Journal Review
Escaping a family crisis and a humiliating breakup, Frances accepts an art fellowship in the northern reaches of Norway, working as an apprentice to an uncommunicative painter. Meanwhile, high school student -Yasha returns from America to Russia with his father, who hopes to reunite with the wife who stayed behind ten years earlier. The two story lines converge midway through the novel, as Yasha and his family turn up in the remote coastal town where Frances is staying. The disorienting "midnight sun" of summer near the Arctic Circle creates a mystical setting as the characters work out their personal and family dilemmas. New Yorkers Frances and Yasha (both immensely likable characters) experience profound culture shock in the sparsely populated town and yearn to connect with each other. The "will they/won't they" tension keeps the pages moving, and readers will delight in the often surprising turns of phrase offered by debut novelist -Dinerstein (also a published poet): a first view of mountains is described as "horrifying," and a character's body is said to be "tonguing the wind that blew around it." VERDICT The unusual setting and evocative language will appeal to those looking for a summer read with a bit more depth.-Christine DeZelar--Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.