I was hoping to like this one more than I did. It's a vampire novel, set in an alternate, contemporary America where magic works. It's very well-written, and *compulsively* readable. I kept reading, despite my annoyance at the arbitrary stuff required to make this world work, and how seriously the book takes itself. But I mostly *hate* vampire novels, and I wouldn't have read it, if I'd known what I was getting into. Does that make sense? At least there weren't any zombies (onscreen anyway). 2.8 stars, for me. I did put it aside for half a day, but got sucked back in.

Here's the very convincing review that led me to read it:
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/...
"Sunshine has, like most of the protagonists of this sort of story, a normal life outside of the paranormal world. She's a baker in a diner in a bad part of town, a cafe run by her mother and step-father. Unlike most of these stories, this isn't background that disappears as soon as the vampires start showing up; in fact, the vampires come first and then we see Sunshine's normal life. The cafe is a delightful nexus of family and neighborhood connections, full of people who Sunshine cares deeply about and helps the reader care about as well. ...

.... Even if you hate the current flood of paranormal romance and urban fantasy books, look for this one. It's a shining example of how an excellent writer can weave those ideas into a compelling, multi-faceted story rather than a litany of cliches."

This is a strange mix of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, set in the world slightly similar to the popular Twilight TV series, but predating it. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for January 2022 at SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group even if I finished it in February.

The story starts with our protagonist/narrator, named Ray and nicknamed Sunshine, who works at café cooking cinnamon rolls and other wonderful confectionaries. She is kidnapped by a group of vampires and set on a chain in a ballroom at some mansion as bait for another chained prisoner, who is a vampire. This world, which relatively recently had devastating Voodoo Wars is full of supernatural, most of which considered enemies of mankind, but while it is possible to co-exist with were-creatures or demons, vampires are the ultimate enemy – unstoppable and powerful, who, after their initial frontal assault failed, now have a secret cabal to enslave the world by economic domination. However, not all vampires are the same, and Ray’s co-prisoner seems to envision a world where two groups coexist, so when the prisoners manage to escape (for Ray has some magic powers), she feels a strange affinity with that vampire and tries to communicate with him, but evade other ‘bad’ suckers…

The narration is as if we are in the head of the protagonist, it is often witty and interesting, even if sometimes her mind wonders (to give us infodumps) or repeats how she out to wake up before dawn to go and do cinnamon rolls or about her overprotective mother, or her boyfriend, etc. Just to show Ray’s obsession with her work: the novel has 55 mentions of cinnamon rolls (and 8 more of cinnamon roll singular) and 270 of vampires. This repetition is sometimes tiring. Another issue is that the story it seems was planned as a part of a longer series – we have large infodumps about different magical creatures, e.g. There was a series of articles about how many different kinds of Weres there are, another favorite topic. Wolves are the famous one, of course, but they’re actually comparatively rare. There are probably more were-chickens than there are were-wolves, which if you’re asking me explains why comparatively few Weres go rogue as against, say, how many demons. and there are several Weres in the story, but they never use their ability to change or use other powers if any. The same goes with demons. All these create a feeling that the story is not complete and its potential is severely underused.

Thinking is bad for you. The heroine of this novel, Rae Blaise or Sunshine, as she is better known, finds this out the hard way after she drives out to the lake to have a think and avoid arguing with her mum. Because while there, she is kidnapped by a group of vampires, dressed in blood red silk and chained in a room with another vampire, Constantine. But clearly, Sunshine is a bright girl (I am still unsure exactly how old she is supposed to be, early twenties, I'd guess) and learns her lesson quickly and pretty much stops thinking from then on. At least enough for her latent powers to reveal themselves and take over her logical processes.

I am doing this all wrong, aren't I? Because, actually, I loved this book. I couldn't put it down. And even the fact that listening to Sunshine is like talking to someone with a severe case of ADD because she keeps diverting and sidetracking until you lose all sense of what she was talking about to begin with and the fact that the book was like the worst kind of tease, sucking you in, turning you on and dumping you with barely a hint of a resolution, no answers to most of the questions and no sequel in sight wouldn't put me off.

I liked Sunshine. Despite her ADD and obsession with baking (I hate cooking with a passion). She felt real. She was sometimes snarky, sometimes frustrating, sometimes puzzling but always interesting and complex and believable as a character.

I've never read any McKinley before but I new fairy tale retellings were usually her thing but that this wasn't quite her usual thing, being a gritty and dark urban tale about vampires. Yet I am not so sure. This is a dark vampire tale but with a healthy dose of fairy (tale) dust sprinkled all over it, I think, and some sunshine. It is a Beauty and the Beast story, which Sunshine tells to Constantine during their confinement and which, I hear, McKinley is a teeny bit obsessed with but it is not really a romance (damn it!).

Yes, Constantine is definitely the Beast of this piece. He is ugly and alien and he smells. No sparklingly brooding underwear models here. No sighing over anybody's eyes and beautiful chests. Yet Sunshine, and I along with her, grows to love him despite herself and the "resolution" to their relationship at the end, while it is incredibly frustrating in its unclarity, is also incredibly sweet (I did tell you this was a fairy tale, right?).

But back to the unclarity (and the biggest fattest BUT of this book). Questions. Questions, questions everywhere. Where did Sunshine's father and the entire Blaise family disappear to? What are the "bad spots"? Why does Sunshine's mum avoid her all the time and why did she leave her father? What precipitated the Voodoo Wars? Has the presense of supernatural beasties always been the reality of this world or have they just crawled out of the woodwork at some point? What is the Goddess of Pain? What is Mel? And so on and so forth. Answers are not forthcoming.

You know that scene in the middle where naked Sunshine lands on equally naked Constantine but, while he initially appears into this, he soon comes to his senses and won't put out and Sunshine is all frustrated with engorged labia and parts to match. Well, I swear McKinley put this in just to illustrate graphically how she was going to leave her readers at the end of this book. Coitus interruptus, are you bloody kidding me? I need the other two books (at least) in this series, which Mckinley is not writing.

I was going to take a star off for that but then, I know for a fact that I am now going to go read every single other book that McKinley has ever written and come back to this one over and over looking for that something that I have possibly missed but really just to spend some time with Con and Sunshine again, even if they are not doing anything new and Sunshine is mainly blathering on about her cinnamon rolls as big as her head. And if that doesn't make a book five star worthy, I don't know what does.

For my sanity, I need to stop reading any books that are marketed towards fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Because spoiler alert: none of these books are ever like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Sunshine is about a normal girl--seriously cannot express how numbingly normal this girl is--who, guess what!, is nicknamed Sunshine (gag) and finds herself tangled up in a supernatural battle after being kidnapped by vampires.

Sunshine wakes up every morning at 4am to bake cinnamon rolls for the family bakery. Sunshine likes to spend time in the sun. Sunshine spends pages and pages describing her family, her friends, her cinnamon rolls, her cherry tarts, her apple pies, and her bakery's customers even though it's terribly uninteresting and nobody cares. Sunshine does not like to talk about the fact that she's a powerful sorceress or the fact that she's embroiled in a war between vampires and humans or the fact that she is party to a very tense, strange, and unexplained sex scene with a vampire midway through her story. Sunshine doesn't like to talk about anything that is of actual importance or interest. Sunshine makes cinnamon rolls at 4am every morning, though, and Sunshine loves to talk about that. Sunshine manages to kill a vampire with a butter knife, which should be nigh impossible and definitely merits some investigation, but Sunshine doesn't really mention it afterward. Sunshine is too busy baking cinnamon rolls at 4am.

Sunshine and Sunshine are deathly dull.

I just love this book to pieces (which makes reviewing it incredibly hard). But not everybody will love it as much as I did; try a sample, and you’ll know.

Sunshine is an urban fantasy tale set in an alternate U.S. and narrated by a 25-year-old baker named Rae Seddon (nicknamed Sunshine). One night she gets kidnapped by vampires. And.... the blurb doesn’t give away any more than that, so I won’t, either.

What I love about this book:

I love Sunshine, as a character. She feels like a real, three-dimensional person with an actual life. I love that we get a full picture of her life, even the not-strictly-plot-relevant parts like her job in her family’s coffeeshop and reading vampire novels and her relationship with her landlady, and that it all manages to be interesting anyway. I love that she responds to events in a realistic, human way, which makes the urban-fantasy world feel more real than most. I love her ramblings and sense of humor.

I love Sunshine’s voice. McKinley is a fantastic writer, and her lovely, fluid prose just pulls me right in every time. You might think an author known for her young adult fairy-tale retellings might have a hard time writing writing an adult, modern voice, complete with slang and frank discussions of sex, but it totally works. I love the conversational tone and the way she tells the story as if to someone from her world and who already knows the basic facts about it.

I love the weird, evolving relationship between Sunshine and the vampire, Con. McKinley’s vampires are fairly awful creatures and she doesn’t let you lose sight of that--even at their best, they look disgusting, they smell bad, they don’t understand human emotional needs--but in spite of (or because of?) that, the two main characters have a complex, emotionally charged relationship that’s tons of fun to read about.

Why 4.5 stars, rather than 5:

Sometimes Sunshine’s ramblings go on a little too long, making the plot sag a bit in the middle. Fortunately, though, things pick up again toward the end--I’ve read 5 or 6 McKinley books and this is by far the best climax (and aftermath) that I’ve seen in any of them. (It seems like she has trouble with climaxes--often they’re rushed, or giant deus ex machinas, or just rather boring, but this one has none of those problems.)

All the unanswered questions. Some you wouldn’t always expect to be answered, because life goes on and isn’t always tied up in a neat little bow; some will leave you thinking you must have missed something. You didn’t. What did Bo say in his email to Aimil? Sunshine opened it like 3 times and never read it?? What kind of nonsense is that?! Oh.... that wasn't what you were wondering? Oh right....

Common misinformation about this book (because there’s a lot of it!):

“It’s YA”: No, it’s not. McKinley mostly writes young adult books, but this is not among them.

“It’s horror”: It’s urban fantasy. “Horror,” to me, is stuff you read to scare yourself. I avoid horror because I don’t need to add fear to my life, and I almost avoided this book for that reason. And okay, there are a couple viscerally horrifying scenes, but you’re not likely to get an adrenaline rush beyond what you get from reading a good book.

“It’s not a vampire romance”: It is and it isn’t. Not exactly romance novel material, and yet....

In the end, I know this is far from a perfect book, but I absolutely loved it. For days after finishing, I couldn’t read anything else and kept going back to re-read bits of this one instead. So it gets rounded up to 5 stars for being one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in months.

No pretty, sexy vampires here. They were dead things that could rip you apart in seconds. And not to mention scary. So, that itself makes the book get its first two stars. It's been a long time since my last good vampire novel (Fevre Dream) and I have been wanting to read this book ever since I read about it in one of those 100 SFF Books You Must Read lists. My expectations were met, mostly.

The main character works in a restaurants, specializing in cinnamon rolls. So, this book is full with descriptions of doughs and whatnots - it might make you hungry too. Consider yourself warned. She was quite likable, pretty normal, enjoyed a steady and healthy relationship. She's brave but not too much it became unbelievable. And the fact that she actually admitted that she sometimes needed help - not trying to soldier it by herself come what may - is something I appreciate. Alas, she also had some flaws - but I am not sure whether it's because of the vampire's influence or she's just fickle.

If there's a thing I wish the book has less, it's the overlengthy internal monologue which slows down the pacing quite significantly in some parts of the book. I admit I skimmed around 20-30 pages because the rambling happened before some important plot scenes. Also, while the vampires are not those alluring gods like Anne Rice's (saved by her fantastic storytelling), there is one particular scene which I think should be omitted because it seems to come from your usual vampire fantasy novels or fanfiction sites, and does not correspond to the overall tone of the main character and the book.

However, the book has lots of interesting stuff in it. Magic, all kinds of supernaturals (including triffids!), even the worldbuilding. This could easily be one of those Sookie Stackhouse novels - spanning over 20 books or so - so I applaud McKinley for not taking that route and gives me a satisfying ending.

I have my alarm clock tuned to NPR as that gets me out of bed and away from it fast, fast. One morning I awoke to hear Nancy Pearl offering summer vacation reading. Weird, I thought she was dead. Anyway, she suggested this one. As I have enjoyed a couple vampire books, I followed her recommendation.
I wish I hadn't. Sunshine is the main character, she works in a bakery and has a little community together with her mom, boss (married to her mom), various friends, and her boyfriend. The world has changed with the vampires coming to light (sorry, bad pun) and starting a war which they lost. Many years after, it still isn't safe, but Sunshine goes out to the lake and is captured by the fanged ones. They leave her as a meal for a vampire chained to the wall. Ah, but wouldn't you know it, he doesn't want to eat her. And she happens to be the daughter of a sorceror.
The set-up and the world are pretty good, but the execution is mired in the digressions of the main character. This book could have been half the length, but we get thoughts, memories, commentary, and more from Sunshine. Fine, if it was amusing or worthwhile, but I wanted to throw the book across the room the 45th time she digressed into a pointless tale right in the middle of an action scene.

Well...um...where to start? I picked this book up on a recommendation from my sister, who LOVES it and I can honestly see why she loves it. It is delightfully strange and I appreciated that much of this story was about the bond between a human and a vampire...but an ACTUAL vampire, not some guy who glitters in the sunlight.

While I did enjoy a lot of this book, there were a few things that REALLY bothered me and I just could not let go, even after I put it down. First was that I wanted more. I wanted more building of Sunshine's past...for example...where is her father? What happened to him? Is he actually dead? I also wanted more about Con. How exactly was he doing things "different"? Finally, my biggest issue, what the heck was that almost sex scene in the middle about? I honestly do not feel like it served any purpose whatsoever to the plot.

Other than that this was a decently good read and the things that annoyed other readers didn't really bother me. I actually enjoyed Sunshine's narrative, because it felt like a real person telling her story. Real people will lie to themselves to avoid dealing with things they don't want to deal with, so this was very real to me.

Eh.

As an antidote to vampire romances that don’t seem to feature actual vampires, I suppose it’s pretty good, but I just couldn’t get into it. The first person narration may have created a full bodied character, but all that introspection got in the way of, you know, things happening.

Throughout the story, you may think that action is about take place, but then Sunshine will head off on a tangent about baking cinnamon rolls. Again. Several pages later, you’ll get back to the thing that was happening, but any urgency will have been sucked out like a vampire was at it. There are about two hundred pages where, objectively speaking, things happen, but the narrator spends the entire time treading the same mental circles into dust, so it feels like absolutely nothing has happened. The book/character pulled it together for the last 50 pages or so, but at that point I was too tired of it all to get engaged.

In other news, I want a cinnamon roll now.

Bullet Review:

This was a good read, but wow, curveballs! Firstly, the writing style/protagonist's voice takes some getting used to. Rae/Sunshine is a bit of a verbose chick. Secondly, the book opens with the impression you are reading urban fantasy of the Sookie Stackhouse variety - and then it takes a MASSIVELY dark turn. Good but dark.

My rating really wavers between 3 and 4 stars.

Full Review:

Geez Louise. Amazon just poked me today, asking how many stars I would give this book, and I realized, I ought to stop procrastinating and write a review. Which I am reluctant to do because 1) I seem to be running out of steam in writing these reviews and 2) writing a review for this particular book is going to be hard!

Rae "Sunshine" Seddon is just an average girl with an average life. She works in a bakery, reads books about "Others", and does movie night with her mom, step-dad, half-brothers, boyfriend and whoever else pops in. This ALL changes one night when she leaves Movie Night to head to the lake. There she is captured by vampires and is imprisoned with another vampire, Constantine. Will she escape? How will her life change?

This book was different than most vampire books I've ever read. Number 1, this is NOT another Twilight clone! (Breathe a sigh of relief, people!) This is a really gritty portrayal of vampires and "part blood" (meaning anything from werewolves to demons). Not once does Rae dreamily wish Constantine would bite her and whisk her away into the sunset. In fact, Rae's boyfriend is a (probably human) chef, with whom she actually has a good relationship (DO NOT FAINT!).

Number 2, Rae as a protagonist is incredibly different from most of the other first person accounts I've ever read. This style is what I would call "stream of consciousness" - Rae's narration is basically whatever is on her mind, regardless of how or if it might even pertain to the plot. This is how we learn that this society is this post-apocalyptic pseudo-waste ground where the threat of vampires (who control a good 1/5 of the world economy - I think, if I remember correctly) is imminent. It's in chunks, hidden much deeper into a novel than a reader is accustomed to. This makes "Sunshine" much more realistic, but also much more frustrating. When I started the book, I thought it would be a fluffy read in the vein of Sookie Stackhouse; by the time I ended, I was in awe of the very gritty very urban fantasy (very NOT paranormal romance) read I got.

I Buddy Read this with an engineering friend of mine, and we both came to the conclusion we liked it, but Rae's narration almost killed it for us. Also, the fact that this is a standalone is a good and bad thing; I really hate these endless series these days, because I never seem to be able to get to book 1, much less book 18. (Unless I hate-listen to Anita Blake, apparently.) On the other hand, if ever there was a book set up perfectly for sequels, this is it. It is the perfect balance of an origin story, leaving some nice little tails dangling, but still closing up all the loose ends in a way that makes you satisfied.

Am I glad I held onto this book through so many moving/shifting genres culls? Absolutely! Would I read it again? Probably not. Would I recommend? Definitely.

I read this some years ago, I remember liking it. A re-read should be good, I can refresh my memory enough to do a full review.

Dang, I got SOOOOOO sucked into this book it was embarrassing. :S

I set my kids up with cereal, snacks, ramen noodles, popcorn and movies so they wouldn't interrupt me and read for a straight day, I was so entranced.....isnt that terrible? lol

Sunshine (Rae) is a baker at her stepdads coffee house and completely satisfied with that. Until she is kidnapped by vampires that is. By using her almost forgotten magical talents and with the assistance of a vampire hostage, she escapes and hopes to go back to her life. But fate is never that easy, is it?

Of course there is some backlash, and now that she has saved a vampires life they have an odd bond. The story takes interesting twists and turns, and generally worldbuilds into a fantastic take on vampire attraction.

Two issues I had lowered this to a 4 star rating: 1) the totally implauible scene where  Sunshine lights some candles and incense and thinks about Constantine and is suddenly transported into his lair. naked.
That scene just threw things off for me.
2) was the large info dumps. I found myself literaly skipping ten page segments to get back to the story.

But the characters and the worldbuilding were wonderful.The magic system fantastic-I especially liked how Sunshine was attuned to daylight, creating perfect anti-vamp magic.
But holy loose ends!I vainly looked for a sequel, just to find out what happened to everyone! I want to know! ugh