From the acclaimed author of This Place is Still Beautiful comes an evocative, achingly romantic road trip story about grief, diasporic identities, and deep-buried secrets that haunt us, perfect for fans of Past Lives and The Farewell.
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.
Thank you to Books Forward for this copy. All quotes are subject to change.
I tell you that we are the only two people in the world who have lived the same lives. The same memories growing up. The same arc. We flew over the sea together, you and I. I think this must mean that even though you are gone, I carry the parts of you onward.
One thing I have come to enjoy about Xixi Tian’s writing is the way she interweaves the Chinese immigrant experiences into her characters’ lives. While it may not be everyone’s exact experiences, including my own, the heart of our people’s collective struggles is there and that is something I find truly powerful to see in an English novel where only a decade ago it would not have been a story easily shared for the masses.
All the Way Around the Sun features themes of grief and finding one’s way through life after momentous changes. Told from Stella’s perspective several months after her older brother had passed away in college, I thought the best part of this book was the slow unfolding of her and her brother Sam’s story. As children they had grown up in China with their grandmother while their parents had come to America to make money first so they could give their kids a better life before bringing them over. I know these are the experiences of some Chinese immigrants and I cannot imagine the depth of hardship it would be for the parents to sacrifice time with their children during momentous milestones in their youth, but also for the children to uproot their childhood into a foreign place with people that are family but also strangers.
Sam and Stella’s upbringing in China and their eventual settling into small town America where people of colour are so rare all the Asians are grouped together were such important foundations to the story. It shaped Stella’s view on life and her relationship with others, both family and in society. However, while Xixi’s first novel focused more on the racial discrimination that can be found in such small towns, this book then pivots more importantly to the grief of losing the one person who understood her in a way that no one else ever really could. Because they had gone through the same upbringing and uprooting together.
The mystery surrounding of Sam’s death was told in snippets. We don’t immediately know how he died or why Stella felt an extra layer of guilt around it. Was his death not accidental? Why did Stella have some secret that the reader does not know about until at least past the 50% mark? It did make me read faster to try to get there, but I will say the added anticipation maybe made the final reveal a little less rewarding in a way. I probably read too many thrillers. However, my favourite part was the way we get individual chapters where Stella is addressing Sam directly. It gives both information about their relationship bit by bit but also addresses her grief and how she’s dealing with it, almost by talking to him in her mind. The most poignant sentences in this book I felt came from these chapters.
So I’ve been clearly gushing about these 2 themes that are explored in the book. The question as to why it’s not rated as highly all comes down to one word: Alan. Don’t get me wrong, I like the guy enough. The college tour part of the book was an okay buildup for Stella’s eventual reveal about Sam’s college experience that led to his death, and Alan was a great character in pushing for Stella’s growth. However, their romantic feelings for another just felt so out of left field. It’s the trope of “oh, we were childhood friends and all those feelings were built from that time and resurfaced now” but we as readers don’t get to really see that develop in real time during the actual story we’re reading. It just felt strange that after a 1 week college tour where yes, they’re stuck with each other in close proximity, their misunderstandings were not only fully resolved but led to “I love you”s. I could’ve done without the romance at all, but if it had to be there, something slower and more hopeful at the end would’ve made more sense to me. Otherwise, all the strong emotions Stella was facing with her grief and fears about Sam, her family, and the future could’ve easily made Alan into an emotional safety net that was mistakenly named as romantic love. It didn’t take away from the story, but it also didn’t really add to it in my opinion.
Overall, I came out of the story really enjoying the family dynamic, the realistic and slow growth Stella went through, and the way the Asian experience was showcased in this novel. It’s so true that own voices stories bring such a beautiful magic to storytelling that some of us cannot recreate without having lived some of this ourselves. This is definitely one of those stories.
Down the Rabbit Hole 