A review by arieldeborah
Sunshine by Robin McKinley

adventurous funny reflective slow-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

 
"What do you do when you know you have two days to live? Not a lot different than if you didn't know. Six months you could do something with. Two days?
Hmph...
Take a good long look at everyone you love - everyone local; you've only got two days. And don't tell anyone. You don't need to be surrounded by a lot of depressed people; you're already depressed enough for everybody."

McKinley has this slow, beautiful way of writing in all her books that I've read - this trait continues in Sunshine. McKinley somehow makes vampires and magic seem mundane and baking cinnamon roles magical, weaving not only a story but an entire slice of life - with all the boring and messy bits, and all those tiny things that make life worth living hidden between.

"Humans don't deal with extreme situations very well. Our pathetic bodies freak out."

Sunshine is a baker. She is bored with her life but won't really admit it to herself and frankly doesn't have many other ideas of what she would be doing anyway. The world she lives in is much like ours (well, the ours of 2002), but with magical creatures being the norm and a recent magical war having gone down in her childhood.

"Reading scary books is weirdly reassuring, most of the time: it means at least one other person - the author - has imagined things as awful as you have."

The story kicks off with that life all changing, though Sunshines narration takes you a hot minute to figure out how said change happened. Sunshine is very much a "stream of consciousness" book, seen through the eyes of someone whose mind wanders and tends to ramble and overthink (or avoid thinking if possible). It is a bit difficult to describe the plot from there without spoiling it, but it wanders in several places whilst still keeping the story fairly close to home.

"It's funny, vampires have been a fact of human existence since before history began, and yet in our heart of hearts, I don't think we really believe in them."

In the end, the story was funny and lovely and felt deeply real at times. Also, the vampire descriptions were definitely a change for me (in a good way...ish).
The story lost half a star from slowing down just a bit too much in the middle for me and a few other technical things, but in the end, I did love this novel and look forward to reading more of McKinley's backlog of work.
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