Nina MacLaughlin is a writer, carpenter, and literary journalist whose writing braids memoir, myth, folklore, and close observation. I appreciate her ability to move associatively between personal memory, ancient stories, and contemporary unease.

Originating as a Paris Review series and later expanded, Winter Solstice is a book-length lyric essay that moves through scenes of winter—sledding hills, frozen ponds, lit windows, festivals of light—while repeatedly returning to the solstice as a moment of arrested motion.

MacLaughlin frames winter as a season that “wrests at what is most primal and uncertain in us,” pairing domestic comforts—soup, fires, garlands—with an undercurrent of dread, mortality, and collective grief. She layers contemporary scenes with myths and rites such as Krampusnacht, Saturnalia, Yule logs, and Newgrange to suggest that modern winter traditions carry the shadows of ancient fears and hopes about darkness, death, and the return of light.

Critic Olivia Kate Cerrone aptly describes the book as an exploration of how darkness sharpens perception, concentrates both fear and wonder, and makes possible a renewed sense of connection across time and between people. MacLaughlin ultimately reassures us that through shared rituals, stories, and attention, “strands of light” persist between us even in the longest night.

“It is the animal in us that knows the dark - this season stirs that animal in us, and stirs the memories, ones that live in all of us, submerged so deep; of the ancient dark, of a time before gods, before form and words and light. Memories of helplessness. Somewhere, deep in, we remember. The animal in us remembers.”

BOOK: Winter Solstice

BOOK REVIEW: Nina MacLaughlin’s Winter Solstice

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