For the first time since the challenge started, I thought about not doing the POPSUGAR Reading Challenge this year. I haven’t been thrilled with the most recent prompts and the challenge had started to feel like a chore. Then I perused the list and much like the mafia, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in again. The Goodreads group suggested Robin McKinley for the category, “A book by an author with flora or fauna in their name.” I chose to read Sunshine because vampires are my favorite monsters.
Sunshine (2003)
Written by: Robin McKinley
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Pages: 389
Publisher: The Berkley Publishing Group
The Premise:
Sunshine is what everyone calls her. She works long hours in her family’s coffeehouse, making her famous “Cinnamon Rolls as Big as Your Head,” Bitter Chocolate Death, Caramel Cataclysm, and other sugar-shock specials that keep the customers coming. She’s happy in her bakery — which her stepfather built specially for her — but sometimes she feels that she should have a life outside the coffeehouse. One evening she drives out to the lake to get away from her family, to be alone. There hasn’t been any trouble at the lake for years.
But there is trouble that night for Sunshine. She is abducted by a gang or vampires who shackle her to the wall of an abandoned mansion, within easy reach of a figure stirring in the moonlight. Sunshine knows that he is a vampire and that she is to be his dinner. Yet when dawn breaks he has not attempted to harm her.
And now he needs her help to survive the day…
Spoilers Ahead.
Discussion: I thoroughly enjoyed McKinley’s worldbuilding. In this universe, were-creatures, demons, and vampires are all real and called Others. Weres and demons are integrated into human society and people can be part were or demon. Vampires, known as the Darkest Others or suckers, live outside the bounds of society. Humanity is still struggling to recover from the Voodoo Wars started by the vampires. The Special Other Forces (SOF) are a police order dedicated to controlling non-human creatures. Our heroine, Sunshine, lives a normal life as a baker in her family’s coffee shop with her mother, stepfather, younger brothers, and Mel, her biker boyfriend turned cook.
The book’s unique style, a sort of stream of consciousness from Sunshine’s point-of-view, is both a positive and a negative. You feel closer to Sunshine because you’re completely in her thoughts. Sunshine is a charming and relatable character and I definitely identify with her love of baking. When Sunshine is kidnapped by vampires, we learn that she isn’t quite as ordinary as she seems. Her father is Onyx Blaise, the leader of a powerful magical family. Sunshine herself has considerable magical abilities and uses them to rescue herself and Constantine, the vampire who was supposed to eat her. Unfortunately, the book often goes off on ten page tangents to dump the information you need to understand the back story. Between the Voodoo Wars, supernatural creatures, Special Other Forces, and Sunshine’s past, it is a ton of background information.
One of my favorite things about this world is that the vampires are not sexy. They’re disturbingly inhuman. Sunshine describes Constantine as “Overall he looked…spidery. Predatory. Alien. Nothing human except he was more or less the right shape” (pg 27). I enjoyed that Sunshine and Constantine form an alliance against the vampires who kidnapped them, but I found it weird when they share a single awkward sexual moment. Sunshine transports herself through time and space (without her clothes) to save Constantine from a sort of comatose state and they have a strange make-out session. Nothing else happens romantically and there isn’t even any tension about Sunshine having a boyfriend because Mel barely registers as a character. Can’t a girl and a vampire ever be just friends?
I honestly want to read the book again just to count the number of times someone mentions “cinnamon rolls.” Sunshine is a baker but the number of times cinnamon rolls come up is almost absurd. Even when the SOF cops suspect that she is lying to them about vampires, they still want to know if there are any cinnamon rolls left. It’s almost as if Robin McKinley has created a world in which vampires are real and all of humanity is obsessed with cinnamon rolls. Granted, I’m throwing stones in a glass house because we are one month into the coronavirus lockdown, and I have baked chocolate chip cookies, banana blueberry muffins, raspberry muffins, brownies, blackberry blueberry scones, and two types of pound cake. If I’m ever kidnapped by vampires, I probably would also want to ignore it and get back to making cookies.
Sunshine is bizarrely uncurious about her own life. Her parents split up when she was six and she never sees her father again. Her mother doesn’t want Sunshine to have anything to do with the Blaise family, but eventually allows Sunshine to see her grandmother. Some of the novels best scenes are flashbacks to Sunshine’s grandmother teaching her how to use magic. It’s heavily implied that Sunshine’s father and grandmother died in the Voodoo Wars, but Sunshine never tries to find out what happened to them, even though she loved her grandmother and has access to a secret police force. Constantine knew her father because he tells her, “Onyx Blaise had — has — no children” (pg 63). You would think that she would eventually get around to asking, “Is my dad dead?” Sunshine doesn’t even seem to know her boyfriend, Mel, very well. He was a soldier in the Voodoo Wars, but she doesn’t know what he did.
Obvious unanswered questions about the main character’s past and sexual tension that goes nowhere says only one thing to me, especially in an urban fantasy book — sequel. Sunshine was published in 2003 and there is no sequel. The battle between Constantine and his vampire enemy concludes, but many people in the book say that the vampires plan to take over the world in the next hundred years. I guess we will never know.
In conclusion: I have never felt more certain that a book was setting me up for a sequel. Sunshine features intricate world-building, budding romantic tension, and massive unanswered questions. I was shocked to learn that this is it. I did enjoy the book overall, mostly because Sunshine is a well-developed and likeable character. However, I would like to start a petition to make Robin McKinley finish this story.
No Comments