Robin McKinley is known for her rewriting of fairy tales, and in Sunshine she does it again. This time out the story is Beauty and the Beast with the beast being a vampire.

Local baker Rae (Sunshine) Seddon decides to go out to the lake for a little quiet time. She's captured by a group of vampires. She's chained to the wall of a ballroom, and left as food for a vampire that has also been chained to the wall. Sunshine and Con form an uneasy alliance as they make their escape from Bo's vampire clan. Unknowingly they've created a bond with each other and set out to destroy the vampire Bo and his gang.

McKinley does a good job setting up her world, and her characters all have depth. I enjoyed the book, but it does have it's flaws. It is told in the first person from Sunshine's point of view. A lot of time is spent in Sunshine's head as she goes about her life and recovery from her captivity by the vampires. The start of the book is compelling. It starts off with Sunshine's abduction pulling the reader into the action. From there though, we languish through considerable back story as McKinley sets up the next piece. Too much time is spent as Sunshine relates what's going on around her. There is more a sense of being told the story rather than being shown. This is where the flaws in the book are noticeable. The ending as an open ended quality. I wonder if it wasn't supposed to be the beginning of a series with the rest never being picked up by the publisher. ( )

This book didn't quite meet my expectations, the storyline had the potential to be really good but didn't quite get there for me. The main character 'sunshine' was likeable enough but everything with regards to her being kidnapped, working as a baker, developing a bond with a vampire and getting involved with the SOF just didn't work. I would have liked the author to provide more detail about her background and perhaps develop her special powers a bit more but she didn't do this. It had enough in it for me to want to continue reading it till the end but it wasn't really as good as I wanted it to be. ( )

Not many authors could entice me to read a book about vampires, much less give it a high rating. Not the highest, because there is a fair amount of disturbing gore towards the end, but by that time I'd been thoroughly sucked in, if you'll pardon the pun. I would read a sequel, if Ms. McKinley's muse provides one for her to write. And that's saying a lot about a vampire book. ( )

Sunshine by Robin McKinley was a book that was recommended to me when I asked for suggestions of great vampire novels and after reading the description I was immediately intrigued. Sunshine takes a different approach to the vampire genre, spinning a world both like and unlike our own where vampires lurk in the shadows of a world battered by the “voodoo wars”. Sunshine is a seemingly ordinary young woman but she soon discovers that her talents go beyond creating killer cinnamon rolls and “bitter chocolate death”. I loved how McKinley wove the story together, filling this book with sunlight and cinnamon rolls along with vampires, demons, magic handlers, and the like. There is something about this book that I found captivating and soothing, it somehow has a therapeutic effect for me. Sunshine has become one of my favorite novels. If you love vampire and you’re looking for something different rather than the same old tired vampire romance try Sunshine! ( )

I could not get beyond page 212. The sentence structure, dialogue, use of contractions (I'd), and tired theme, was too much. At one point, I was actually hoping that the vampire would put Rae (or me) out of her misery. She is not an endearing character. This was a pick for my sci fi book group, and many in the group were in agreement: this is the worst pick in 7 or 8 years.

SPOILER: Towards the end of the book there is a description of Con leaning over Rae, where there is a description of "stuff" falling from the ceiling. The writer could have used a dictionary if she couldn't think of a better word than "stuff", which is used several times in the book.

As mentioned above, my mind was numb by page 212, so I didn't finish it. ( )