Sunshine (2003)

Did not finish. ( )

yes I abandoned it, but no, it's not a terrible book. Robin MckInley is good. And this book has all of the elements that made me love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But I'm just not in the mood.
Admittedly, I become very hard to please when at the end of a long pregnancy. With Leo, I was only able to read food and family memoirs until the end. ...

( )

Love, love, love this one. Wholely original, compelling, and detaild, I remember details about Rae's bakery as much as the more magical aspects of her world. A beautiful story.

Read Abigail's review at All Things Urban Fantasy. ( )

This book makes me hungry. All the baking stuff! The book is completely rich with detail, the character and world-building is glorious.

Edit now I've reread:

Sunshine was a reread, but it's been a while and some things were a surprise to me all over again. I was worried it wouldn't stand up to a reread: I skimmed a couple of other reviews and saw that people had some pretty negative things to say about it. And I certainly saw the truth in the things that were said, but I also enjoyed reading the book again. It helps that it's an incredibly rich experience. The writing appeals a lot to my synaesthesia. It's pretty sensual writing as it is: there's a lot of detail, a lot of talk about cooking, and also a lot of feeling. Descriptions of sight and smell and hearing.

The whole book is written in first person POV. The main character is Sunshine, and she's "not your average heroine", as they say. She has no ambition, she's not all that smart, she's not that brave, and she'd quite happily live in her bakery all her life. Some people find her hard to like, but I think she's quite human and although she does get a lot of power, eventually able to kill vampires with her bare hands, she doesn't want it and she's scared of it. I find the writing interesting and absorbing, but I'm sure for some people it's too rambling and/or dense. It does take her an awful long time to do something as simple as log onto the internet equivalent.

The book is set in a post-apocalyptic world where magic, vampires, demons and succubi -- to name a few -- exist. All those kinds of things are for real. This could be 'our world in the future' given the references to Bram Stoker, or an alternate reality. It's never made exactly clear, but I suspect the latter because of the slang words the characters use -- "carthaginian hell", "spartan", "sheer". I like that there's no explanation of the slang, given that the book is narrated by someone who is a part of that world. You just don't really think about that kind of thing in normal life: why would you? Sometimes Sunshine explains things that shouldn't need explaining, like how to kill vampires, but you can't avoid doing exposition entirely!

The thing that really impresses me about this is that the vampires aren't overly sexualised, and while Constantine is still an ally, he remains unsettling. Okay, there are a couple of scenes in which Sunshine has chemistry with him, but she's also more often than not aware that there's something vastly different about him. He moves differently, he looks different, there's no heartbeat... I like the way it ends on an awkward note, with them not quite sure what's going to happen now but not wanting to lose contact with each other.

A lot of the more minor characters are completely fascinating and have big backstories that we clearly barely glimpse -- Mel, Yolande, Sunshine's grandmother, the goddess of pain, the SOFs in general... There's a lot to work with in this world, and I'd really love to see a sequel.

My main problem with this book is how it made me crave cinnamon rolls. Argh! ( )

First review:
I wanted to like this book. And on a certain level I do. Rae is a very likable character and one who I feel a lot of sympathy for and identification with. I want to do what she does, except with books instead of Sunshine’s Eschatology and the giant cinnamon buns. And being me, I don’t mind a lot of the aspects that others might find highly dubious. By this I mean the vampires.

On the other hand, a story that I would otherwise greatly enjoy was largely ruined for me by the smuttiness. Lots of smuttiness. I can deal with a little bit, but Sunshine contained quite a bit more than I could quite take.

Which is really sad, because Robin McKinley’s writing is wonderful. I love almost all of her books and the fact that I can’t whole-heartedly love this one makes me unhappy. It is also sad because at its bottom Sunshine is a story of good and evil, of light and dark. But it is what it is and so I cannot recommend it. I wish that I could, but in all conscience, I can’t.

Second review:

Erm. I love Sunshine.

I don't know what happened exactly in the time between that first read and now. Maybe my standards of smuttiness changed, maybe it's just that the story got under my skin and stayed there. I think it's that.

It's a book I don't recommend for everyone. If content bothers you, don't read it. If content doesn't bother you, or if you want to try it anyway, you'll find great characters and worldbuilding, and a wonderful antidote to certain other vampire novels.

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A re-read of a lovely book. It’s definitely NOT for the little 13-year-olds who just read Beauty, but it’s a great antidote to other vampire books I could mention (by which I mean just about all of them). And Rae is possibly one of my favorite narrators ever. [July 2011] ( )