Sunshine

Rating:
Summary: For me, Sunshine pushes all the right buttons
Review: I have been a huge Robin McKinley fan since I was a teenager and I've been a big Buffy fan since season two. So imagine my delight when I found out that not only was McKinley also a big Buffy fan but was writing a contemporary vampire novel.

I liked Sunshine. A lot. Yeah, there was some annoying phrasology. I don't mean the slang. I enjoyed that. I got tired of here repeating a line verbatum. When I had an opportunity to meet Robin McKinely at a book signing, she was asked about her writing process. Any good fan knows, she wrote her early books longhand on legal paper and then typed them on an ancient typewriter. Now she uses a computer. I think this accounts for a great deal of the annoying repetitions and run-ons She might just need a more ruthless editor but then again so did Tolkein.

Sunshine pushed the same buttons for me as Buffy but also the same buttons as Aerin and Harry. A heroic female who is not completely at home in her community. She has an inner strength and metaphysical power that she can't quite figure out and further seperates her from her community. Until she figures out some things about herself she can only dance around the men in her life. I love this stuff. There were also a few elements in her descriptions of city government and the Others police that ring particularly true.

Finally, I like a book that attacks all the senses. As I sit and type this review I can feel sun on my face and smell a faint whisp of cinnemon. I want to know what happens next but I am also content to physical experience of reading one of Robin McKinley's book wash over me, entertain me, and inspire.

Rating:
Summary: A little bit of sunshine
Review: I would actually give this book a 4 1/2 for tone, but 5 for everything else. It wasn't a book without flaws. The tone of Sunshine was sometimes jarring, sounding like an older woman...although I suppose that some women in their 20s can sound like they are having a midlife crisis in their mid-twenties, I guess. Especially if they are in danger of being killed by vampires or their own confusing powers!

McKinley went a different direction with this novel, but I liked it. It was a strong novel, a bit fluffy, but not written just for the sake of horror or romance. McKinley fleshes out an amazing dream-like world--she's sets up a world that is sly, funny, romantic, and dangerous.

I wasn't sure how I would feel about this book, especially since I read the mixed reviews beforehand. I meant to wait to check it out from the library, but someone bought it for me as a Christmas present. I loved it, and I'm going to keep it. It was a fun romp, and it made me smile. However, if you are interested in being introduced to McKinley's books I suggest start with her classic retellings *Beauty* or *The Outlaws of Sherwood Forest*. This one doesn't appear to be universally liked by everyone, even McKinley fans.

Rating:
Summary: Just NOT a good book...
Review: This book was one big relentless rant by an author who, after having published sveral novels, I would have expected something better. The whole story is set in a world that is supposed to be "post Voodoo War". What does that mean? Well, the author never explains, and so the reader can't hope to know. The protagonist is Rae, or Sunshine, as she is called. She seemed a cold and inept heroine, but even that I could over look. The biggest problem is that there is really no plotline. It took a quarter of the novel for the meager semblance of a story to kick in- and after that, all that is in this book is a cold Charlie's Coffee shop baker posing as a heroine, her lifeless boyfriend, an even more lifeless vampire named Con (whom you'll have to learn to appreciate throughout the book, boring as he is, because he is the only bit of intrigue you'll find), the odd SOFs (think anti CIA), and all of it existing in a poorly constructed fantasy world.

The book doesn't even have a genre. Is it horror? Well, no, not really, because there is nothing remotely scary. Romance? No. There are two sex scenes that I can think of in the book, and niether are much more over a paragraph. The rest of the book is devoid of such sensualism, but because of the potency of those two scenes, no child would or should read the book. The book tries to be humorous, but when jokes become whole pages long, it has long stopped being funny- especially when the jokes are about baking.

Bottom line: This book was nothing but boring. Skip it. If you're looking for horror or romance, go elsewhere, because I promise you won't find it in Sunshine.

Rating:
Summary: If you have nothing else to read
Review: If you are bored with nothing else to read, you shouldn't be too disappointed if you give this book a try. The plot is fantastic, but the style/voice of the book is seriously lacking.

Rating:
Summary: Too many cookies spoil the plot
Review: Sunshine starts out wonderfully, with an interesting narrator, a fully-fleshed history, and a nice supporting cast but somewhere between part 1 and the rest of the novel things seem to fall apart.

The heroine discovers an amazing new superpower at every turn, on top of being a brilliant cook (And as much as I adore puttering around my kitchen even I found the over-obsession with desserts tedious), and of course, she's instantly the best at everything she tries. So perfect is she that McKinley decides to completely abandon that supporting cast until Sunshine needs them for something, protection, or whatever. There is something vaguely unsettling about her boyfriend and many hints are dropped but there is no follow-up and what would have made for something far more interesting than the silly government stuff that replaces it it is just an aggravating loose end. To create such interesting characters at the outset and then do nothing with them is either sloppy or just setting up for a sequel. The problem is I know McKinley is a great fantasy author and not the usual kind, merely clutttering up the pages with characters and plots to milk one decent idea into an endless series of cliffhanger novels and so this is doubly frustrating coming from her pen.

The narration style is both a blessing and a curse. Some of the heaps of expositon are made more interesting with Sunshine's particular voice but her need to reiterate lines that were perfectly strong on their own just deaden the impact. For 200 plus pages we're treated to a rather prudish narrator, where the worst swear she uses is 'bloody', and suddenly there's a some blurry glimpses of sex scenes and I get bashed over the head with porn-speak. To go from 'gosh' and an insistence on using 'pee' in place of piss to that was so jarringly uncharacteristic it yanked me completely out of the story. It was like reading a young adult novel and being smacked in the face with a rolled up Penthouse letters column.

The climax was short, a complete letdown, considering the many pages we have devoted to Sunshine dealing with the death she feels is so imminent. As in the far superior 'Spindle's End' the ultimate last battle depends very heavily on the visual and would work much better in a film than a book. On the whole, it was really disappointing, especially considering it had such a good opening act and enough tantalizing hints to keep me reading but the more I realized all the clues about other people were leading towards dead ends the more getting towards the finish became a chore. As a short story it would have been great, as a novel there was way too much padding. A massive misstep for an otherwise enjoyable author 2 1/2 stars.

Rating:
Summary: It's got potential, but...
Review: I've never read this author before, so I don't know if this was...slumming, shall we say? or the normal writing style. But either way, lordy in a bucket. 'Sunshine', though the idea behind the storyline was intriguing, was mind-blowingly slow and the climax was, at best, nonexistant. The characters were not well developed, the writing skill overall was nothing if not elementary, the concepts were just too far fetched to even be mildly interesting, and I honestly don't give a crap about how many dollars are in a 'blink' or when money assumed the title of an unconscious bodily function. If you've read this book, I'm truly sorry... but if you haven't yet, heed my word! Spare yourself from this painstakingly boring read.

Rating:
Summary: Really 4 1/2
Review: I would have given this book 5 stars, but the author left me hanging without the promise of a sequel. There is alot of background information in the beginning of Sunshine's story. She lives in a sort of parallel world to ours. She works at the family's bakery/cafe and reportedly makes the world's best cinnamon rolls. She has a warm family, a biker boyfriend, and a killer work schedule. One night she drives out to her family's former vacation cabin to think and gets kidnapped by a gang of vampires. They chain her within reach of a very hungry looking and also chained vampire. They escape and together try to defeat a very nasty master vampire.

The characters are very colorful, half demons, vampires, weres and magic handlers. I would have liked to have learned much more about all of them, but I probably wouldn't have been able to lift the book if the author had gone into any more detail. All I can say is that I hope there is a sequel. There are a few matters hinted at that need further clarification.

Rating:
Summary: Buy it! Read it! Love it!
Review: From the first page, I knew this was going to be a -ripping- good story. There are millions of books out there, but very few actually make it to the 5-star rating in my eyes. I guess the best way to explain what this book has done for me is to explain that I am going out tomorrow to buy -two- of every book of Robin McKinley's that I can find, because I fully expect to read them to pieces. I am a bit bemused at the amount of 'liked it/hated it' reviews there are...but it is a testament to true greatness that causes such a controversy, isn't it? Honestly, the story was fascinating, the characters intriguing and funny in unexpected ways. She reveals them to you a little at a time, rather than the long dolorous descriptions found in a lot of pulp books. They are snapshots, and far more effective when told in Sunshine's voice.
This book is brilliant. I smiled, I laughed, and I set it down a few times to fully absorb the ideas presented.
And of course I had to stop and bake a few cinnamon rolls to eat with it. The brown-sugar smears on the pages seem fitting.
Read it, and decide for yourself. I'm hoping you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing, But McKinley Is Still Worth Reading!
Review: Sunshine just needed some time alone. She knew that she should stay at her family's movie night and snuggle with her boyfriend, but she knew that she couldn't play nice for that long. So she headed out to the lake to sit and think. Sunshine hadn't gone to the lake in a long while, but she used to go out there with her grandmother when she was little. Everyone knew that the lake wasn't safe, that dark things and bad spots were out there, but there hadn't been any reports of someone getting attacked in a while so Sunshine felt safe. Until the vampires came. She never even heard them coming, but then, you never do.

Sure that she would never last the night, Sunshine was stunned to discover that the vampires were giving her to another vampire as a kind of meal. This vampire was imprisoned and so he couldn't hunt for himself. But what was it about the imprisoned vampire that made the other pack fear him so? After Sunshine got over her fear of being chained in a room with a vampire, she discovered that his name was Constantine and there was something different about him. When Sunshine realizes that Constantine cannot go another night without feeding off of her, she determines to rescue both Con and herself from the vampire pack. Surprisingly enough, Sunshine succeeds, and ends up in ever more trouble than she was in when she was chained to the wall...

This was a difficult book for me to get into. I didn't really identify with the heroine and found that I didn't really like her very much or understand her choices. It is also written in a kind of stream of consciousness style that can be disorienting. I did enjoy Sunshine's descriptions of her life and her job as the best cinnamon roll baker in the area, but the world that she lived in is still kind of hazy to me. I don't really understand it and cannot really describe how the rules have changed in their world versus our world. This sense of mystery isn't all bad, after all, Patricia McKillip does it beautifully, but it made the story difficult to understand. There really isn't an end, either and I hope for a sequel, but am pretty sure that we won't get one as McKinley rarely revisits the same world, The Hero & the Crown & The Blue Sword notwithstanding. Sunshine reminded me a lot of Spindle's End, but in a different setting, actually. There is a lot of normal life that goes on in between the big events and you never really get the chance to warm up to the characters. Is it worth reading? I would say yes. But I am not saying that it is worth buying, per se. I think anything that Robin McKinley writes is worth reading, but this is not one of my treasures.

Rating:
Summary: "Beauty and the Vampire"
Review: Sunshine is destined I think, to be one of those books people either love or hate. As a McKinley fan any new book by her is to be welcomed, but having finished this I'm left in the curious position of having liked it in spite of it's flaws, and thus sympathetic to a number of reviewers who have NOT enjoyed reading it at all. Part of the problem is likely to be the disconnect between the familiar, young adult novelist and fairytale re-teller we've come to love and that author departing, so to speak, from the text to try something new. Although I had problems with Sunshine, I'm inclined to give McKinley the benefit of the doubt because I'm always glad to see authors trying to stretch beyond their comfortable niche. Also, I think McKinley has managed to find that most elusive of things, a new take on an over-saturated genre. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed my Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton, Tanya Huff, et al. but the field has gotten over-crowded with similar stories about sexy, bad-boy vampires and the women that love them.

McKinley's vampires are genuinely loathsome creatures that aside from being human-shaped, don't share a lot of similarities with humans. I was convinced Constantine was really was an alien creature who wasn't wild about having anything to do with a human. Not only that, he's ugly, smells funny and generally has a terror-inducing presence. He's definitely not the in-humanely handsome, charming, sexy, and powerful vampire figure that is currently in vogue. And although Sunshine and Con develop a "bond" it is more in the nature of an obligation where the two parties would be just as happy to have nothing to do with one another under better circumstances. Although it doesn't get explored in depth, Sunshine is legitimately concerned about the morality of choosing to let such an evil creature exist. Now Con is a bad guy who has chosen a different way of un-life than other vampires, but McKinley never really forces Sunshine to confront what that means. He's obviously less bad than the villain, but by how much? We don't know because Con never really does anything "evil" except to kill the doe. We don't know much about his history and that's a flaw on the author's part. Depending on how she explored it, his concrete actions would have framed a more compelling dilemma for our heroine than what her generalized understanding of the evil of the Others gave her. But on the whole, I thought her take on vampires was interesting enough that it boosted the book past some serious flaws.

I also liked the thought that went into Sunshine's element. A really nice, fresh twist that explores the opposites attract theory in the sense that she is the embodiment of daylight while vampires are the embodiment of darkness, and that by being so much of one she is drawn to the opposite element, much as one coin has two different but connected sides. At the same time, her association with the dark possibly 'taints' her by incorporating vampiric elements like seeing in the dark and sense of direction to her arsenal. Whether the same is true for Con is left open, or perhaps hopefully to be explored in a sequel.

The biggest problems with this book were the narrative. Sunshine's first person voice was difficult to connect with. She too often came across as whiny and pathetic, making her hard to sympathize with. When the whole book rests on the singular voice, you want to make an effort to give someone the readers can relate to, though they don't have to be perfect. The other glaring problem with Sunshine's voice is that it was too often the vehicle for large exposition dumps. The information was necessary, but I think there were cleverer ways to do that didn't so obviously break up the flow of the plot. Also, the sentence structures and word choices McKinley uses as Sunshine were awkward to the ear, consistently throwing me out of the flow of the story. I especially was annoyed by the phony slang that felt forcibly inserted to help differentiate this world as futuristic. 'Sheer" really bothered me until I decided that it was slang for kosher. The lack of dialogue between characters was equally problematic. I don't think there was an actual conversation at all between Sunshine and her mom for instance, and without conversation between Sunshine and the other characters, they never really got a chance to become fleshed-out. Mel was a prime example. He's this intriguing guy, little bit bad-boy but a cook and you know he's got something going on, but what? Heck, we don't even get to see inside Con's head. I just wish that there has been more to connect me to the other characters. I will say there were some funny comments and observations but on the whole, the structure of the writing was very disjointed. Perhaps that fact I felt compelled to struggle past those flaws should be attributed to the strength of the basic story.

When Sunshine tells Con the tale of Beauty and the Beast, I think McKinley is definitely alluding to Sunshine as being a modern re-telling of the Beauty and the Beast, inserting the vampire for the Beast. I was also reminded of two of my favorite books by her, The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, both structurally and in similar characters. This is definitely a book that with more polish and trim could have been a McKinley classic. As it stands I think this book is symptomatic of a writer's growing pains as she tries to explore some familiar themes in a new way. Sunshine is a strong story that ultimately fails in it's execution. I'd definitely read a sequel, one where hopefully McKinley's very well-deserved story, character building and writing skills can really shine.