Sunshine

Pandemic read. Normally not a vampire book fan, but this appealed to me. I guess I like my vampires with a touch of dystopia. ( )

The writing is erratic and hard to follow and it seems as if there is a lot of information you're missing out on. However, the plot and characters themselves make this is worthwhile read.
There were many instances when I was throughly confused about what exactly was happening, between the main characters all-over-the-place thought patterns and actual narrative. I wish there had been more dialog between characters to act as a sort of anchor to events, but no such luck. The sex instances in the book also seemed forced, as if she used it to try to keep the reader pulled in to the relationship between Sunshine and Constantine - but it was written in a sort of different voice, was unnecessary, and slightly took from the events at hand.
Overall, I'm not exactly sure what to think of this book. I wouldn't read it again but I finished it without having to force myself and I did like the storyline... I can say for sure that it is overrated.

Original: 9/2007
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updated: 4/2010
It's weird how three years ago, my thoughts on this book were so different. But people change and tastes in books change along with us. I picked up this book for a steal at a used book store not remembering if I liked it or not, but wanted to try it again anyway. I'm just about finished with the second read-through and am really enjoying it. While Sunshine is still a little erratic, I don't find her thought processes too difficult to follow - like I mentioned in my first review - though there are a lot of random side-thoughts in parenthesis that you have to read and then re-read the sentence without them to sometimes remember what the original thought was. However, this is how people really think and speak so it is just a normal conversation instead of a more unnatural way of thought that most books use just to keep the reader on the same page, pardon the expression. I've added another 2 stars to my review this time around. I really enjoyed it. ( )

I really liked that the otherness of the world this takes place in sneaks up on you. Interesting vampire story with complex worldbuilding and magic systems, make me want to bake a bunch of stuff. ( )

Reading this book was sort of like spending your whole life making cinnamon rolls and wanting nothing more than to feed people, only to discover that you... oh wait, this analogy would probably be a spoiler. What I’m trying to say is that this is not the sort of book I feel like I should have enjoyed, but I found myself greatly enjoying it. As a result, I had an identity crisis. Who am I? What has happened to me? Do I really like and dislike the things I think I like and dislike? I’m very traumatized, but somehow I’ll push through and write this review.

The story is told from the first person perspective of Sunshine, a baker who is particularly devoted to making cinnamon rolls for the family-owned coffee shop she works at. She tends to ramble about minutiae, and she constantly goes off on baking-related tirades, but she’s a likeable character in spite of it. In this fictional world, some people can do magic, and there are also Others like vampires, demons, werewolves and… werechickens? Everybody is aware of this although most people don’t encounter the Others very often, or at least not that they know of. At the beginning of the book (after a lot of rambling), Sunshine drives out to the lake and has an encounter with some Others. After that, events in her life get much more interesting.

I feel like I enjoyed this book way more than I should have. It felt like a guilty pleasure, because it had several problems. It’s also kind of romance-y, although in a more subtle (usually) way that somehow managed to avoid pushing any of my “Annoying Romance Trope” buttons even though I felt like I should have been annoyed by some aspects of it. I’m not even quite sure why I enjoyed this book so much, I only know that I didn’t want to stop reading it, and I looked forward to having time to pick it back up each day.

One of my bigger complaints is that the magic started off seeming logical and well-defined, but I thought it went off the rails and became more the type of magic that can do whatever is convenient for the plot. For most of it I was able to suspend my disbelief, but I was particularly annoyed at the part where people could detect/track others via asynchronous network communications.

Although the ending was pretty satisfying as far as the story at hand, there were some threads left hanging and I was left wanting more details in general. There were several interesting characters with hints of interesting back stories, but we never learned nearly as much as I wanted to know. I also grew frustrated at times with Sunshine not questioning various things because she “didn’t want to know”, but I did want to know! In many ways this felt to me like the first book in a series where I would expect to learn more about the characters over time and get answers to all my questions. Even though this book’s status as a standalone was one of the reasons I chose to read it in the first place, I ended up annoyed that it was a standalone.

I haven’t read many vampire novels (that isn’t much of a spoiler, it’s revealed early, I’m just being extra cautious since it’s a current Goodreads SFFBC group read), but thinking back to the ones I remember reading, I seem to have enjoyed them. Maybe I have a weakness for this sort of story and didn’t know it? I guess at some point I’ll have to test the theory with another. Did I mention my annoyance that this book doesn't have any sequels? :p ( )

A few years back, Neil Gaiman wrote a blog post suggesting a new book-sharing tradition, calling it 'All Hallow's Read'. A friend and I adopted it immediately afterwards, and so every October we swap some of our favorite spooky books.

This is the book I sent out this year, one of my favorite vampire novels... and I couldn't resist reading through it a second time to see if it lived up to my remembered hype. I was a bit worried during the first arc (which had the potential of being handled amazingly poorly)— but overall I'd have to say yes, yes it does.

I've long viewed Sunshine as an answer to Twilight, even though it was actually published a year before that much maligned bit of teen fiction hit the scene. Confession time: I actually enjoyed reading Twilight— it's over-dramatic and silly, completely fails to approach anything like a healthy relationship, and attaches tons of emotional weight to signifiers that actually mean very little— all things that jibe well with what I experienced as a teenager.

Sunshine, on the other hand, feels emotionally real in a lot of the areas modern paranormal romance feels fake— here we're presented a world where vampires slake their cruel hunger on mortals and humanity as a whole suffers for it, where scary things happen to our heroine and emotional trauma results, and the companionship that eventually develops feels natural.

There's a lot of things I feel this book does right, but I think that last point hits on the key one: the relationships between characters feel natural. Maybe comparing this book to paranormal romances is unfair, because romantic relationships really aren't the focus of this story— it's more about how the main character relates to herself, her friends, family, and past. The end result of exploring those relationships is a very vivid, strongly voiced character that I'm quite happy to have revisited.

And of course there's also vampires, magic, vows of undying loyalty, a visceral final battle, and the promise of a hard-won future. All excellent additions.

So yeah. I'm going to stay up tonight and tomorrow reading The Excorcist, which my friend sent me as her part of our book swap. I'm looking forward to being scared witless, but I hope that Sunshine finds a place in your heart like it's found in mine (nestled somewhere in the gristle between aorta and left ventricle).

Happy Halloween! ( )