Sunshine

published	2004 by Jove
binding	Paperback
isbn	0515138819 (isbn13: 9780515138818)
pages	416
description	There hadn't been any trouble out at the lake for years, and Sunshine just needed a spot where she could be alone with her thoughts. Vampires never en...more [close] There hadn't been any trouble out at the lake for years, and Sunshine just needed a spot where she could be alone with her thoughts. Vampires never entered her mind. Until they found her.
date added	12-09-06 edit book

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Mary-Beth rated it:

01/26/08

bookshelves: fantasy, fiction, romance, sciencefiction

I like Constantine and the other vampires for their inhumanity, which is not an easy thing to write. Although Constantine is slightly more human than the other mad vamps, he's still emotionless, alien and interesting for those traits.

I like the post-apocalyptic world the author created. I like the demons and the 'bad spots' and the charms and other magics, but what I like best is that they exist in a world that largely goes on as normal. The world does that no matter how bizarre things becom...more I like Constantine and the other vampires for their inhumanity, which is not an easy thing to write. Although Constantine is slightly more human than the other mad vamps, he's still emotionless, alien and interesting for those traits.

I like the post-apocalyptic world the author created. I like the demons and the 'bad spots' and the charms and other magics, but what I like best is that they exist in a world that largely goes on as normal. The world does that no matter how bizarre things become and I think McKinley was very insightful to write it that way.

I really dislike the protagonist. This makes reading a story told in the first person very difficult. This is a shame because the character is moderately interesting - an obsessive compulsive baker who loves her work. I thought the idea of being a solar powered transmuter of objects was kind of cool. But then she becomes the most awesomest of all transfigurers ever who can make vampires immune to the sun, then she kills a vamp with a butter knife, which she discovers she can do because she can detect vamps from miles away, then she develops the ability to see in the dark and sense the life forces around her and gets a spirit-guide doe and tree while she's at it. You see where I am going with this. By the end of the novel I was so tired of her special abilities I wanted to throw the book every time they were mentioned. It wasn't even just her. Constantine turns out to be really over the hill, which in a vamp means he usually can't even bear moonlight, but of course Constantine can and so much more, etc etc ad nausium.

Sunshine as a character has all the romance of a limp noodle. Then there's this scene where she suddenly appears naked on top of Constantine and I giggle and cringe for a few pages while she groans about how she has to get some hot vampire lovins NOW DAMMIT, but is pissed off because the cold undead gray coloured mushroom smelling dude won't put out. WHAT? WHAT? She wants a man she describes this way constantly? This isn't even mentioning she doesn't feel the slightest twinge of guilt about her boyfriend. Yeah . . .

Other things that constantly pinged me out of this novel: This novel has completely inexplicable and stupid slang like "carthaginian hell" instead of plain unadorned regular hell (I don't get it, do the Carthaginians have a worse one?) and "sheer" and "Spartan" instead of "cool," and "tough" which every time I read them, I had to read the sentence two or three times to get it because given that these are regular words, which mean quite different things than what the author wants them to, I momentarily think the author has been doing drugs and is just writing any old word any old where.

Another thing, the exposition nearly makes my head explode sometimes. This author writes her book the way I would probably write one, by cramming all of her concepts about the world into Sunshine's internal monologue in a completely lame and boring way. I certainly hope Sunshine doesn't often ruminate on the history of her society and the scientific facts about supernatural creatures when they're about to eat her for afternoon tea, but the way the book reads you'd think she does.

I know it's a cliche, but the old "show, don't tell" mantra is fully illustrated here. The protagonist tells the reader everything, because the author gives us no credit to figure anything out for ourselves. There's very little straight dialogue or description. It's mostly a bunch of narration which the author probably finds hilarious, but I can't stand Sunshine's voice so it does nothing for me. This is probably because she is the queen of tangents and is always asking stupid questions - in her freaking head. Plus she always thinks the same things over and over and over and over again, which while it is realistic makes for crappy reading. It's like this book is trying to be an awesome stream-of-consciousness novel and failing utterly.

The best parts of the novels are the parts that aren't explained to death, like the "bad spots," which, even though the author does thwack the reader with lots of exposition mallets about, somehow still retain some mystery as to what precisely they are.

Then there's the horrid long sentences into which are interjected completely tangential ideas separated off by dashes and which make me cross my eyes at the page, frown, and stop reading, then restart reading, this time ignoring the awful hunk in the middle so I can actually understand what in the blue blazes she's on about.

My reading of this novel has been full of moments where I'll be reading along quite contentedly and then go cross-eyed at some ridiculous thing and be knocked right out of the story. It got worse towards the end rather than better....less

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Jarrah rated it:

12/18/07

bookshelves: author-robinmckinley, broadgenre-adultspeculative, cliche-demons, cliche-spells, cliche-vampires, cliche-weres, country-america, genre-urbanfantasy, setting-alternatereality, setting-postapocalypse

Read in November, 2007

Adult vampire urban fantasy. Sunshine lives in an alternate post-apocalyptic world in which Others - vampires, weres, demons and angels - are accepted and everywhere. We don't see any angels, mind you. This one's all about the horror. Sunshine herself lives an ordinary life working in her step dad's cafe, until she does something stupid and gets herself captured by the 'darkest' of the Others: vampires. Seriously messed up psychopathic supervillains. Sunshine finds out a few things about herself...more Adult vampire urban fantasy. Sunshine lives in an alternate post-apocalyptic world in which Others - vampires, weres, demons and angels - are accepted and everywhere. We don't see any angels, mind you. This one's all about the horror. Sunshine herself lives an ordinary life working in her step dad's cafe, until she does something stupid and gets herself captured by the 'darkest' of the Others: vampires. Seriously messed up psychopathic supervillains. Sunshine finds out a few things about herself, and forges an alliance with somebody she shouldn't even be able to look at, let alone develop feelings for.

I wanted to love this. It's a classic of the genre. It's an intricately thought-out world, and a lot of the ideas, especially about magic, are rather cool. But it is, for me, flawed in ways I can't get over. Principally, I had trouble with the POV. It's first person, and the style is fairly colloquial - we don't ever forget that it's Sunshine herself telling the story - but it's the most distant first person narrative I've ever read. Even after three hundred pages of first person story, I don't feel that I have a handle on Sunshine as a character. Her voice distances us from the action by diverging into random info-dumps about the world (which, yes, very complex and layered) and about her own backstory. At one point she grabs a steak knife and lunges out the door after a vampire, and then gives us a page and a half of information about the proper way to kill a vampire and basically how a steak knife won't cut it, before we finally get to the end of her lunge. And, OK, I accept that that info was relevant to the action, but it should have gone, oh, any time before the lunge.

She's also a somewhat unreliable narrator, which further distances us from the story. She doesn't lie, but she keeps secrets from the reader. She'll obsess about something for weeks, and even though we're with her for those weeks, we won't find out until weeks later, when she suddenly brings it up. I think this is a deliberate stylistic decision, and is supposed to reflect Sunshine's own mindset and the way she's trying to hide her own thoughts from herself and pretend amnesia that she doesn't feel. Still, it works against my involvement in the story. Case in point, I was actually musing about these things while reading the life-or-death climax, which shouldn't have been possible. But the truth is, I didn't care very much whether Sunshine and Con came out of the climax OK.

Two more things, quickly:

One is the villain, Bo. He's supposed to be a looming menace over the entire book, but we not only don't meet him until the last couple of scenes - The Lord of the Rings has a successful villain the heroes never meet, so that's not a deal-breaker - but we don't get any clear sense of his personality or presence before then either. He doesn't work as an antagonist. The Goddess of Pain is a better one, but she's not central to the plot, and is also introduced fairly late.

The other is the romance. Or, rather, the sex. There's this completely random, very graphic, not-quite sex scene in the middle of the book, that just made me tilt my head to the side and stare. There's growing feeling between the two central characters, which could be read as sexual tension, but then this sex scene, which is over in about a paragraph and a half, comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere and is never followed up on and I just kind of wonder if McKinley's editor asked her to make it sexier and this was what she came up with? It didn't add anything for me. It's too short to be hot, and too random to be powerful.

All that said, this book made me think, a lot, and that's the sign of an interesting book. And she does a mean aftermath, and a nice final scene, which I can appreciate....less

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Silvercharmer rated it:

08/08/07

bookshelves: scifi-fantasy, vampires

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: Vampire fans and those who aren't sure about the whole vampire thing

Despite my affinity for the fantastically supernatural, this is actually my first vampire book. I've just never been that interested in them. My indifference is such that I'm only just now plowing through the many seasons of Buffy. But when both walkawayslowly and Neil Gaiman highly recommended it, I figured, sure? Why not? And I was justly rewarded.

The strength of this book really comes from the narrator. It’s first person, an approach that can yield good things or unspeakably horrible t...more Despite my affinity for the fantastically supernatural, this is actually my first vampire book. I've just never been that interested in them. My indifference is such that I'm only just now plowing through the many seasons of Buffy. But when both walkawayslowly and Neil Gaiman highly recommended it, I figured, sure? Why not? And I was justly rewarded.

The strength of this book really comes from the narrator. It’s first person, an approach that can yield good things or unspeakably horrible things, but in this case it’s used well. She’s a strong character, with an unlikely occupation (for a vampire story) in that she bakes cinnamon rolls for a living (which will likely result in an insatiable sweet tooth for the entirety of the read, by the way, as she’s very descriptive of all the baking wonders she’s capable of), and her voice is interesting and engaging, thanks to the diary-style prose and a good sense of humor. Her keenest insights, however, are about the vampires themselves, which is what makes the book really shine (Sunshine…get it? Har.)

Keeping in mind that I haven’t read vampire books, this author nails what it would be like to be in the presence of one of these creatures more effectively than any movie or cliché I’ve ever seen/heard. She describes them through non-descriptions, which oddly enough works amazingly well. I felt for the first time that there were real, definitive, alien differences between humans and vampires other than the no soul, no reflection stuff you see everywhere. This author went further, and I got more out if the story because of that.

A problem I had came at the very beginning. At the start of the book, the author plants you firmly in a world that mirrors normal, conventional reality, which set me up for this kind of story: “I’ve just been bitten by a vampire? Holy crap! VAMPIRES ARE REAL!” But then, a few pages later, you suddenly realize you’re in this story: “Dude. Larry got sucked dry by a vampire last night. Bummer for Larry.” In this book, demons, magic, charms, vampires, werewolves, are part of everyday life, and the transition into that knowledge is very jarring, to the point I was flipping back pages to see if I’d missed something.

I also found myself confused about certain concepts, such as the “tree-self,” although I admit I was not a very careful reader this time around, so it’s entirely possible the confusion is my fault and not the author’s. But I feel I should note it.

Anyway, for a first vampire book, I enjoyed it. You probably will, too.
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