Reviews for Sunshine

The average rating for Sunshine based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-14 00:00:00 Andy Mackie Okay, so I seriously pondered over whether to give this book three stars or four. In the end, I DID enjoy it so I felt generous and gave it four, but it's not without its faults. Once, when I was a little kid, my parents bought me my favourite ice cream. There's actually only one kind of ice cream that I actually like and that's mint choc chip. Only they bought this MASSIVE bowl of it with a banana in it and extra chocolate sauce. I can only guess that they'd finally decided to slowly kill me via diabetes, cholesterol and blood-pressure, and be rid of my annoying, argumentative, five-year-old ways. I can promise that it almost worked and they were almost home free except they'd miscalculated one thing - my short attention span. Sure the ice cream was delicious and kept me entertained but there was just so much of it and the mint ice cream was just a little too much in ratio to the choc chip that I like and even the chocolate sauce couldn't entirely keep my concentration. Well, Sunshine is a bit like that. It's good. It's really good. It's a vampire novel so it's pretty much RIGHT up my alley too and so by definition I should have really enjoyed this book. There was really just the problem that there was too much useless narrative in ratio to the action and suspense. Sunshine would start babbling about some inane facet of life that had NOTHING to do with the story and doesn't really add anything to it. Now, if this was world building for a future novel I could have forgiven it, but I have heard, rather mournfully, that there will be no more to this series and that makes me very annoyed. Like when I lost interest in my mint choc chip ice cream at one interval and my evil parents had it whisked away by an annoyed waitress (I'll have my revenge one day!) So whilst I enjoyed much of the book, I found myself falling asleep a lot because it would launch into these long stories like my 80 year old grandma does when you ask her how her day was. Don't even get me started on how UNRESOLVED the end was. There were things I REALLY wanted to know. There were certain sexy scenes I REALLY wanted to read and there was information and intrigue that was left dangling! It's infuriating! One good praise I would like to make for Sunshine is the reversal in a genre of a practice that baffles me. I've complained before that often in YA books, swearing and sex between the main characters doesn't really happen. Yet rape and violence is often described and occurs, sometimes rather graphically. Well, in this book the main character has sex with her long time boyfriend and it's a sweet nonevent - these positive and healthy examples of sex are good! Can we have more caring and loving and healthy relationships displayed for our youth like this, please? There is one particular swearword I wished the book hadn't used (it starts with C and rhymes with bunt... figure it out.) I really hate that word. But the two mentions of dick are cool with me - except Robin Cockblocking McKinley is a cockblocking temptress of doom and if you have read this book then you'll know why I say this! Can someone explain to me why she is not continuing with Sunshine and Con? Please? Why? Why build all this world and have all this and cockblock us (Yes! That's exactly what you did!) only to leave us hanging? It's just rude. At this point I really wouldn't mind what would end out to be the literary equivalent of a pityfuck just to satisfy me and tie up all the freakin' loose ends! Finally, I say I enjoyed this book. I did. Like my ice cream, it was just the kind of thing I liked. Too bad there was so much of it and at times it became work just to get through it and finally finish it. Over all, it was a really good serving of mint choc chip ice cream with a huge serving of cockblock. I liked it, but I refuse to go on a date with Robin McKinley again unless she promises to put out.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-03-16 00:00:00 Anna Jurgas Here is a useful tip, should you ever find yourself face-to-face with a vampire: they are living corpses that eat people. They are not sun-sparkling, abstinent forever-teens. Staying inside all day and being forced to personally kill all of your food doesn't bode well for your mental health (not to mention the fact that you have been alive so long, you've had to re-buy all your Beatles albums in like five different formats). Robin McKinley gets this the way Stephanie Meyer or even, sometimes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, don't -- generally, it is safe to say, vampires aren't creatures whose pictures you want to pin up in your locker. Yes, authors can rewrite the rules of vampirism all they want to make them easy to romanticize (I have a soul! Oh yeah? We'll I'm vegetarian), but it all still comes down to A) creatures of the night B) part of a race that, by and large, views humans as walking ketchup dispensers C) unflattering complexions. In Sunshine, the vampires are gross. They look like what they are, which is, if you will remember, dead. They are also rightly feared by the populace, but that might have more to do with the role they played in the vaguely defined Voodoo Wars that ravaged society some years before, to the point where what seems like a pretty nondescript small city is now the eighth largest remaining population in the U.S. In short, vampires: not very nice. And yet, there's always the special one. But if Sunshine (not her real name, thankfully) can be the Buffy who befriends a vampire, at least she is a total screw-up in every other way (and I mean more of a screw-up than just that she pretends to trip on things and makes too many boys fall in love with her). She gives her mom hell. She barely graduated from high school. She dates a guy with too many tattoos. She's kind of a bitch. She's flawed, and fun to read about, which is important, because she's our narrator. But she is special, with an unknown magical heritage that saves her ass when she's kidnapped by bloodsuckers and chained up in a room with one of them. This turns out to be Constantine, who is that Special Vampire who doesn't eat people, but at least he's still pretty disgusting, as romantic heroes go. The no heartbeat thing would get pretty weird. Also the bathing in his blood, but that comes later. In many ways, this is a Twilight-y book, and you can see why the publisher decided to repackage it in a sparkly teen edition, even though it is about adult characters who actually screw instead of lying in fields and gazing longingly at one another: There's a special girl. There's a vampire. There is a little bit of romance (though Sunshine has the good sense to be freaked out about it, and, at least, never describes anyone's beautiful chest). Also in both books nothing happens for long stretches of time, only to rush through an action-packed climax in just a few pages. (Oh, I forgot, both also involve scenes of googling and message board reading, which still isn't all that interesting.) The difference is that Robin McKinley can write, and instead of filling her pages with repetition and day-to-day mundanities (new word!), she creates a fun cast of supporting characters at the bakery where Sunshine works (I could almost write an entire separate review about the role baking plays in this book, but I didn't want to make anyone hungry) and puts real thought into the way you might react to a traumatic experience like almost being eaten. Like, you might throw yourself back into your work (mmm, cinnamon rolls!) even as you struggled to cope with the fallout, alienating your friends and loved ones in the bargain. This is a really entertaining book that slowed down just a little too much in the middle for me, but it is much, much better than a phrase like "vampire romance" might imply. In a parallel dimension, this book is the famous one, and Stephanie Meyer, bless her heart, is selling her books to Kindle owners on Amazon, because writing is a nice little hobby but why do it full time when you are so bad at it? Man, I really didn't mean to rag on Twilight so much. Sorry about that. (Oh, p.s. to Karen -- sorry for failing at that whole tandem review thing. We can just pretend I wrote this a week ago.)