A review by boggremlin
The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

2.0

I really did enjoy the first three-quarters of Rebecca Dinerstein's first novel, but the lower rating reflects my own intense, personal dislike of romantic relationships forming between teenagers and twenty-somethings. It was not explicitly rendered, but it's hard to enjoy a novel when the denouement is accompanied by an internal monologue of "no no no no."

My own upset and internal screeching aside, "The Sunlit Night" is engaging and human and a little dreamy. I enjoyed the writing very much and I was curious about most of the characters, even if the novel has a certain surface quality to its interactions---it's understandable when the protagonists are both outsiders and are experiencing something of a language barrier, but I was disappointed that Dinerstein skimmed over Frances' apprenticeship and her own coming to terms with herself. I liked Frances; I was rooting for her. But she just seemed to stay lost.

It's not an unapproachably quirky read, but the plot kind of loses track of where it's at toward the end of the book--one of the narrators is remembering these events and dropping little omniscient details about the future, and it's a shame we don't get that part of the action.

In the end, I think Dinerstein conveyed both Frances and Yasha's mutual sense of isolation, but didn't deliver on the characters developing any self-sufficent comfort. (Though that may be a lot to ask of any 17 or 21-year-old. I'm not sure.)