An affectionate, wide-ranging look at a home in St. Petersburg, Fla., from its residents and employees to its peculiar moral code.... The book’s real pleasure comes in its oddball composite character study, like a community kazoo orchestra.
—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review
Sun City has an acid authenticity, and I find myself feeling that Tove Jansson must know St. Petersburg personally. Set next to The Summer Book, it is an indictment of the American way of old age. . . . It is a book which ought to be read.
—Madeleine L’Engle
Her style is not at all 'poetic'—quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures.
—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Guardian
Sun City, her third novel for adults, proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant.
—Lauren LeBlanc, The Atlantic
If Jansson was mostly preoccupied with the wild elements of the natural world, both in her globally beloved Moomincomics and in the adult fiction she wrote in her last three decades, here, she is interested, instead, in a synthetic universe, man-made and mechanical, devised in particular US American fashion to sequester the elderly away from “productive" society, in a preternaturally sunny silo where they won’t "be in the way."
—Ania Szremski, 4Columns
Jansson is ... content to let the narrative almost disappear into what Hegel called the "prose of the world": the beauty of the day-to-day. It is here ... that we find the true meaning of the novel.
—Andreas Campomar, The Times Literary Supplement
These are complicated people and Jansson demonstrates, with compassion and irony, how difficult it is for them to maintain their integrity in the face of indignities of growing old.... Her perceptions are crystalline and correct. Children live in the future, and the old live in the past, and Jansson understands this very well. Death is always in the air of Sun City—but this is a book of life and hope.
—Chicago Daily News
That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure, especially when the translator is as well suited to her resonant, minimal style as Thomas Teal…. Jansson's own texts are always honed to perfection, given a lightness that proves deceptive, an ease of surface which, like ice over a lake, allows you rare access to something a lot riskier and more profound.
—Ali Smith, The Guardian
Jansson’s sentences are imbued with clarity and mystery in equal measure.
—Matthew Jakubowski, The Kenyon Review
She infuses the awesome mystery of existence, its mix of joy, sorrow, wonder, and pain, into even her most buoyant writing and illustrations.
—Evan James, The Yale Review
Jansson has a knack for packing a good deal of wit and wisdom into ostensibly simple tales.
—Olivia Laing, The Guardian
