All the Way Around the Sun caught me. This is a story about grief, family, and moving forwards. I loved it and I should have known I would based on how much I loved This Place is Still Beautiful. Keep reading this book review of All the Way Around the Sun for my full thoughts.
Summary
Stella Chen’s life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family’s suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions around her brother’s death.
So when Stella’s parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. Alan is a reminder of everything Stella wishes she could be — popular, gregarious, unburdened — and a reminder of how lost she is.
As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can’t help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close. Before long, they find themselves pulled into each other’s orbits, forcing unspoken feelings and long-hidden truths into the light.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
All the Way Around the Sun is a multi-layered story about family, identity, and loss. My heart was on an emotional roller coaster and I loved it. It begins with the grief of losing her brother. The gap a loss like that has. It’s full of memories, tender moments, and feelings of resentment. Yet, it’s also about the future and the fears. The fact that we begin to approach a full year around the sun without him. Or the ages when we surpass them. All these moments of grief and the silence within her family. The sibling relationship brought tears to my eyes as we see the fights, the support, and the secrets.
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For Stella, she’s full of guilt and comparisons. She isn’t sure if she can ever measure up and feels adrift and scared of her future. But she also can’t talk to her parents. All the Way Around the Sun is full of moments that change our relationship that we never get back. It’s full of fears which keep us awake and the pressure of not talking about it. It’s also about the secrets parents put on their kids. There’s only so long we can carry that weight before we break. This book is multi-faceted and an emotional shimmering myriad of colors. I full on cried at the end as Tan weaves together a story about assimilation and cultural identity, the obligations parents lay at our feet, and how we can break the cycle.
Find All the Way Around the Sun on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop. org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.