| Sunshine | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 312 reviews)
Sales Rank: 17150
Category: Book
Author: Robin Mckinley
Publisher: Jove
Studio: Jove
Manufacturer: Jove
Label: Jove
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 4.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0515138819
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780515138818
ASIN: 0515138819
Publication Date: November 30, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product 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 entered her mind. Until they found her.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 307 more reviews...
 Not much Vampire in "Sunshine" October 12, 2008
Vampires are all the rage lately, so I was looking forward to reading this book. I thought this book was mostly about vampires, but it's actually about a girl named Sunshine who is a baker and has occasional chance encounters with a vampire named Constantine. The vampire plot line takes a backseat to Rae "Sunshine" Seddons meandering explanations of her everyday dilly-dallies. I'll admit the first encounter is compelling and the author reels you in when she alludes that Sunshine may have other worldly traits. But that's only 25 pages of the book. McKinley spends too much time inside Sunshine's head as she explains her job, her relationship to her mom, and the SOF over and over and over again. It's confusing and ridiculous. I thought at least the ending would make up for all the useless dialogue I had to put with for 60% of the book, but it just fizzles and is anti climatic.
I read the other reviews and I've concluded that unless you really love sci-fiction, you'll find this book frustrating.
So much potential... September 22, 2008
Such a poor execution!
McKinely's "Beauty" is one of my all time favorite fairytale re-tellings. When I figured out Sunshine was a modern retelling of the same tale, I snatched it up!
Oh, how I wanted to love this book. Con is a fresh take on the ubiquitous bad-boy vampire that many other author's have tried to hash out, and failed. Sunshine (Rae) is a bit annoying, but equally as flawed and compelling as Con. Together, they could have gone places.
Except that the author was way too busy setting the scene and forgot to tell the story. Because the book is narrated by Sunshine, the entire novel comes at you from her perspective. Which is just fine, except Sunshine liked to dawdle on the unimportant (so, so many parenthetical sentences, which I do not like), rather than tell the story at hand.
And because of this, the book suffered from flow and sequence. And the reader suffers a case of unanswered questions.
I truly hope that Ms. McKinley writes a sequel to this novel - I for one want to know why Constantine can go out in the moonlight...
 If you hate dialogue, you'll love this book. September 17, 2008
Rae "Sunshine" Seddon is the world's best cinnamon roll baker, or at least she will smack you over the head with that idea until you start believing it. She's a pastry chef in a conspicuous diner filled with possibly-quirky regulars that we don't get to hear much of because we spend our time in Sunshine's head, either in long expository paragraphs about her world of the paranormal (which reminds me: McKinley gives no reason for the explanation role of the narrator. There is no, "I am writing this story for a legal case and must explain this paranormal creature to you." There is no reasoning behind the narrator's exposition role, and there really needs to be one because she is a character within the story itself), or else traipsing off into uninteresting and unnecessary anecdotes on baking.
I'm sorry to say I couldn't get beyond the first half of the book, so this review is only of what I read: Sunshine goes off to her lake house to think some things over, gets kidnapped by a gang of vampires, and while in captivity meets Constantine, the only vamp who doesn't want to drink her blood. She manages to escape through her own considerable abilities as a "Magic Handler" and decides to save Constantine (though she doesn't know why she did that, although she will whine about this decision for the next hundred pages). When she gets back to civilization, things about her town of New Arcadia and her own self are not quite what they should be...
Here are the inexcusable flaws: good and likable subject matter (vampire with a heart of gold, average girl who finds herself with extraordinary powers) that proceeds with the most drawn-out exposition I've read in a while, and a failure to flesh out any other character. I just. couldn't. read. any. more.
Go back and read some of the old Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles rather than pick up this plodding vampire romance.
 Vampires and Baking September 11, 2008
I'm a foodie, so it's more than a little fun to read a story where the protagonist obsesses about food, food creation, feeding people, food gadgets, and the assorted food mania that foodies get into.
I've loved Robin McKinley stories since I ran into them in middle school a bajillion years ago (heh), and I still love them, but I really feel that her writing has improved in a really discernable way. (Unlike some vampire story authors I could name. harumph.)
The timing and pacing are remarkable all on their own. I loved the early but relatively slow reveal of the reason for the book's name. And she does such a good job of making you interested in the myriad characters, even the difficult ones.
So... in short: Hurrah.
Cinnamon and chocolate, meet blood and death... August 29, 2008
I never thought I'd find a novel that married my two guilty pleasures: baking decadent desserts drenched in chocolate and laden with butter and cream, and vampires. Robin McKinley, best known for her exquisite Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, marries both of these passions in the luscious Sunshine. Rae Seddon, known to family and friends as Sunshine due to her attraction to sunlight, is a talented baker at a post-apocalyptic coffeehouse in New Arcadia. Her specialties include Cinnamon Rolls As Big As Your Head and Bitter Chocolate Death. Her other great love is researching the Others, those very real supernatural beings that coexist uneasily with humans, including ruthless vampire clans. Until one fateful night, Sunshine's knowledge of vampires came off the Internet and from friends who worked in a special police department designed to combat the Others.
Sunshine has fallen prey to a creeping sense of frustration and restlessness, and takes off to her grandmother's abandoned cabin at a nearby lake. Unfortunately, said lake is known Other territory, and she is abducted by a gang of vampires. She wakes up dressed in a blood-red dress chained to a wall, only to find that she's not alone: she appears to be a late-night snack for a vampire.
The rest of Sunshine follows several different tangents: Sunshine's discovery of her father's supernatural heritage (McKinley's New Arcadia is populated with halfbloods, demons, angels, peris, vamps, and more), her dangerous alliance with Constantine, a master vampire, and her gradual involvement in combatting evil vampire clans. Her relationship with her biker boyfriend Mel is also explored, as is her uneasy relationship with her overbearing mother.
Sunshine brings to mind the kick-butt, take-no-nonsense Buffy the Vampire Slayer layered with a food porn dessert primer. McKinley's Sunshine is full of unexpectedly crude humor that made me laugh out loud, such as Sunshine's observations on being carried by a vampire: "I could no more have breathed with him than I could have ignited gasoline and shot exhaust out my butt because I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car." Despite the at-times childish language, this is a novel drenched in graphic violence and sex, but beautifully realized. McKinley's novel takes a while to develop, but her vision of the future is completely immersive: a world where surviving humans cling to magic wards to protect them from evil, where one small coffeeshop holds out against drug addicts and encroaching vampires, where the special police unit responsible for protecting humans is losing the battle against vampires. I can't wait to read more of Sunshine's adventure if and when McKinley writes a sequel; the cliffhanger ending is a bit of a letdown, especially since the main action happens only in the last fifty pages or so, and we know as little about Constantine as we did at the beginning. Fans of Charlaine Harris, Tanya Huff and Laurell K. Hamilton will thrill to Sunshine's adventures.
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