Hello? Why is this book not a series? Could we hold a fundraiser and personally pay Robin McKinley to write the trilogy? How could the world have not demanded two more books out of this universe and this writer?

I need to know what happens a hundred years after this book is set. Is that too much to ask?

Extremely enjoyable, I liked this book much more than Twilight. It was a while ago I read it, but I kept the hardback around, which says a lot since I am forced to be ruthless with what I keep after I read due to space.

I did some heavy skimming, waiting for things to happen. She baked a lot of fucking cinnamon rolls.

As usual, this was not entirely what I was expecting. There are character driven novels and then there are novels where you experience absolutely everything from inside the character's head. This one was surprisingly all about the narrator and her perceptions of everything that is happening. Even the things that are happening outside of herself are happening in a way that never seems to be objective. She's not an unreliable narrator; it's merely a more introspective version of first person. I liked it :)

From the description of the story I also didn't know how there would be a whole story centered around her getting abducted by vampires at the beginning of the book. I'm like "Well what about the rest of the book?" The rest of the book deals with the consequences of her abduction.

The coolest thing about this book is why it's called Sunshine. I shall say no more.

Except that I'm surprised this didn't turn into a 15 book Urban Fantasy series, which has nothing to do with why the book is called Sunshine. It could have easily been turned into a long-term series.

Frustrating. I really enjoyed the concept of the world and the main character, Sunshine, was fantastic. But there was too much introspection, too much living inside the main characters head for my taste. There area ton of unanswered questions concerning the world, the "magic" war that set up the world as it is now, the history of the two warring vampires, the backstory of most of the supporting characters. Generally I enjoy those types of unknowns but that is usually with short stories. If this was to be continued with followup books in the same world I would probably continue on just because the author created the skeleton of a fascinating world.
But alas, 'tis not to be.

5/10

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 - n  The Lord of the Ringsn 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.

2.5..........I had high expectations for this book and sadly it just didn’t pan out. I mean this story had the usual suspects that I like: vampires, weres and demons. Oh……and a bit of magic. In the beginning of the story, Sunshine gets taken by a group of vampires and they take her to an abandoned house where they chain her to a wall. It’s then that she realizes she’s not alone. Not too far from her sits another………… vampire.

At that point I thought okay, this is really going to get interesting. Well, not quite. This book is full of world building and world building and…………world building, which is great if this were a series. But this book is a standalone. Just when the plot gets moving, the author goes into more detailed background. I think so much could’ve been done with this story but it just didn’t seem to move. Even when we get to the climax I think………that’s it??

What kept me interested were the characters. I thought Sunshine was a strong young woman whose story could’ve been much more interesting. But the real character I was interested in was the vampire she was left with, Constantine. Unfortunately, his story wasn’t explored. I think there was great potential for this book but it didn’t quite hit the mark.

I was put off by the narrative at the start of the book that explained what had happened before. I'm never a big fan of those. Fortunately that was a concise section and I was able to get into the story about Sunshine. I loved the next 1/3 of the book. It actually felt cosy learning about Sunshine's life in the bakery. To some this may seem mundane, but to me it was nice after a hectic day to read about how to make cinnamon rolls. The section with her trapped with the vampire Constantine, both chained to a wall, was a wonderful concept. A vampire and human figuring out how to work together to escape an impossible situation was just wonderfully conceived. The middle section bogs down a bit as a lot of novels do, but the grand finale is well worth the wait. Nice to see vampires back to being vicious, unpredictable creatures, but with an innate honor code that allows them to form alliances, which in this case spurs the plot. No brooding, handsome vampires strolling through these pages. The weight of book, the worthiness, really comes down to whether I would reread a book and this book certainly qualifies.

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

Sunshine es el séptimo libro que leo de Robin McKinley y hay que decir que es el que más me ha sorprendido, porque tiene poco que ver con el resto de sus obras.
Generalmente esta autora se mueve en mundos evocadores relacionados con los cuentos clásicos de hadas o las leyendas, pero aquí nos presenta una fantasía paranormal muy contemporánea, con vampiros, cambiaformas, demonios, familias de hechiceros y una unidad especial que se dedica a controlarlos.
En Nueva Arcadia intentan vivir como si los vampiros no hubieran tratado de exterminar a los humanos en las guerras vudú hace años. Rae, nuestra protagonista, es una joven de 25 años que trabaja en el obrador de la cafetería de su familia, tiene pareja aunque poca vida social, vive por su cuenta y le encanta leer libros de vampiros. Su pasión es el pan y los pasteles con los que alimenta literalmente a todos sus vecinos... y aunque parezca mentira, eso es el centro de la novela, que va de vampiros pero también es costumbrista, porque eso es lo que hace Robin McKinley.
Pero también, por supuesto es una historia paranormal, y la realidad es que en las primeras páginas, la protagonista es secuestrada por un grupo de vampiros y este encuentro cambiará su vida para siempre. A través de estos hechos traumáticos descubrirá una parte de su vida que creía olvidada y tendrá que enfrentarse a una realidad que tan solo conocía en los libros.
¡Menuda novela inmersiva! está contada en una primera persona muy poderosa con una voz irónica y cínica muchas veces, a través de la que vamos descubriendo poco a poco muchos detalles del universo que crea la autora. Es un universo fascinante que daba para muchísimo más, pero claro, el foco de la historia es Rae, su día a día y cómo afronta todo lo que le ha ocurrido. ¿Hay un romance? Podríamos decir que sí, pero creo que es el libro MENOS ROMÁNTICO que he leído de esta autora, así que no os esperéis eso, por favor.
La novela me resultó desde el principio increíble por cómo la autora consigue que nos sintamos parte de esa cafetería y conozcamos a todos sus parroquianos, por esa habilidad de pasar de lo más mundano a lo más sobrenatural con tanta naturalidad y por lo que se preocupa de analizar todos los detalles minúsculos haciéndolos tan interesantes (desde el funcionamiento de la cafetería o todos los amuletos y aparatos mágicos que se acumulan en las casas a la realidad de que los vampiros son realmente aterradores porque no respiran, son muertos andantes y todas sus implicaciones..).
Por otro lado en este libro se muestra el estrés postraumático de una manera algo superficial, pero en mi opinión muy realista... esta es una de las claves de la narrativa de McKinley, sus personajes son increíblemente humanos y consecuentes. Es imposible no querer a los protagonistas, desde Rae con su mala leche hasta su amiga la bibliotecaria, pasando por Charlie, su padrastro, Con, el vampiro misterioso o su abuela.
Me quedé con ganas de saber mucho más de este universo y la verdad es que el final parece más bien un principio, pero no es algo que me haya molestado, porque no pude disfrutar más del viaje.

Pd. El libro se tradujo al castellano en 2014, está descatalogado pero creo que lo podéis conseguir de segunda mano (es el único libro de McKinley traducido además de «Piel de ciervo»)

Why doesn't this book come with free cinnamon rolls? If you are going to mention them every 20 pages at least have a recipe for them.

I didn't know much about this book going in - vampires and cinnamon rolls - that was about it. Therefore, I, of course, was quite surprised to learn Sunshine was a hardcore urban fantasy novel. Quite a departure for Robin McKinley known for her fairy tale retellings. This book was nothing like she ever wrote before, that's for sure. I didn't know she had it in her to write something so tech-heavy, at times sexy and in such a perky "voice."

Now, I love to complain about new urban fantasy that lacks originality, proper world-building and just plain satisfactory writing. McKinley didn't disappoint in this regard. I thought the plot was brilliant, especially the beginning and the ending - I am amazed nobody had used the whole chaining-to-the-walls-and-using-a-human-as-a-vamp-bait scenario before. The mythology was completely new and very inventive - I loved how creepy, nasty and otherwordly the vamps were. One gets tired of sparkly and sexy creatures that have nothing to distinguish them from humans except wondrous stamina and sexual prowess. Try writing about a girl falling for someone who looks and acts like Constantine in a convincing manner! That's a challenge in itself, I am sure. And the writing, well, McKinley has a remarkable command of the language.

But all these things that I loved about Sunshine were at the same time its negatives. I pretty much thought the book was way overwritten. Sometimes the mythology got so complicated I thought I was on some kind of drug-induced hallucinogenic "trip." And Sunshine herself. Good lord, the woman talked SO much to herself! By about page 200 she started to grate on my nerves so bad I needed a break from her "voice." This book badly needed some editing out of Sunshine's rambling internal monologue and some more dialog. Often reading Sunshine's thoughts was like reading McKinley's own blog - sometimes interesting, sometimes boring, with never-ending parenthesis, notes, *s, and P.S.'s. Weeding out about 100 pages of Sunshine's irrelevant musings would have made this book a much more enjoyable read.

Surprisingly, many things that annoyed readers of this book, didn't bother me. The cinnamon rolls - the bakery business was interesting to me, I thought it added a nice dimension to Sunshine's personality.

And sex, or, rather, lack thereof. I agree, when you read about one person licking another person in the dark, naked, while lying under him, some schmexing at some point is expected. But I personally wasn't upset it never happened. I wasn't even sure I really wanted it to happen. The way McKinley wrote Constantine, he was, in fact, an otherworldly, alien, dead creature. I did however have a question - why did McKinley bring up the whole issue at all if she wasn't planning to explore it? What was the point of writing that scene in the middle of the book with d!cks and c*nts and engorged l@bias? (BTW, I am channeling Sunshine here, how did a book with this kind of vocabulary make it on the ALA's 2005 List of Best Books for Young Adults?)

As for the sequel, I am fine without one. McKinley is still toying with the idea of maybe, possibly, one day, writing it. But I will tell you this for free, it will never happen. I have never seen her go back to her projects and I doubt it will happen this time. This I, actually, sort of understand and even respect - I have seen way too many sequels pulled out of the asses. Sometimes it is better not to force things out.

What else is there to say? It was an OK reading experience. From literary standpoint Sunshine is probably one of the strongest urban fantasy works, but in terms of entertainment it doesn't quite deliver. Ultimately, I don't think I would care to ever re-read this book again or read the sequel if it ever comes out. Too much work.