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3.5 

Sunshine

By Robin McKinley
Sunshine by Robin McKinley digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

A small-town baker uses her magic to confront a post–vampire apocalypse world in this award-winning fantasy Neil Gaiman called “pretty much perfect.”

Although it had been mostly deserted since the Voodoo Wars, there hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake for years. Rae Seddon, nicknamed Sunshine, head baker at her family’s busy and popular café in downtown New Arcadia, needed a place to get away from all the noise and confusion—of the clientele and her family. Just for a few hours. Just to be able to hear herself think.
 
She knew about the Others, of course. Everyone did. And several of her family’s best regular customers were from SOF—Special Other Forces—which had been created to deal with the threat and the danger of the Others.
 
She drove out to her family’s old lakeside cabin and sat on the porch, swinging her feet and enjoying the silence and the silver moonlight on the water.
 
She never heard them coming. Of course, you don’t when they’re vampires.
 
Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sookie Stackhouse will cheer for this tough and quirky heroine. In Sunshine, which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, McKinley has a vampire novel that is “a smart, funny tale of suspense and romance” (San Francisco Chronicle).
 

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1226 Reviews

3.5
“Overall score: 3.75/5 Impressions: I first read ‘Sunshine’ many years ago, but since all I remembered of it was some features of vampire anatomy, this was basically a first time read. ‘Sunshine’ is an interesting book in that it feels like McKinley had all these worldbuilding ideas and essentially just wrote a history or rule book for her made up world instead of a novel. The plot often feels like an afterthought to the worldbuilding as the main character will go off on long, sometimes unrelated tangents about different features of the universe, effectively taking the reader out of the story. They often feel like they compete for attention, which is too bad because the plot is actually interesting and the worldbuilding is INCREDIBLE, so if they’d both worked together a bit better, this book would have been truly amazing. As it stands though, the universe of ‘Sunshine’ is one of my favorites I’ve ever come across. There are so many interesting details and elements that all I want is to know more. Unfortunately, the book kind of ends with a ton of those things left unanswered. Some of those don’t bother me (I don’t mind open endings per se) but some of them really do (who or what is Mel? What happened to Rae’s family? What is Mrs. B? What is the goddess of pain? Etc). Honestly, I’d LOVE to see (and be involved in making) ‘Sunshine’ turned into a TV show. I feel like that medium would allow the worldbuilding to happen a bit more organically and the plot to be a bit more fleshed out. Plus in future seasons you could really dive into some of the above questions which were super interesting elements. Tarot Card Drawn: N/A — ebook Song: “You Are My Sunshine” - Johnny Cash”

About Robin McKinley

Robin McKinley has won various awards and citations for her writing, including the Newbery Medal for The Hero and the Crown, a Newbery Honor for The Blue Sword, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature for Sunshine. Her other books include the New York Times bestseller Spindle’s End; two novel-length retellings of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Beauty and Rose Daughter; Deerskin, another novel-length fairy-tale retelling, of Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin; and a retelling of the Robin Hood legend, The Outlaws of Sherwood. She lives with her husband, the English writer Peter Dickinson; three dogs (two hellhounds and one hell terror); an 1897 Steinway upright; and far too many rosebushes.

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