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A review by pulpfan
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
3.0
Man, I have so many feelings about this book. I read it because people said it was an unusual and unique vampire book with a different take on vampire romance, and it is, but there's a big fat * to go along with that.
It manages to be an incredibly slow read and a bit of a slog without crossing over the line to unreadability, but it definitely teeters on the edge. People who enjoy this book sometimes characterize it as a comfort read, but people who are coming at it from a genre fiction angle seem to be largely frustrated by how Sunshine defies a lot of genre and structure conventions.
The initial setup in Act 1 with the vampire is engaging, but we actually see the vampire for very little of the remainder of the book. The rest is filled with info dumps and rambling narrative tangents about life and the world that often don't "go" anywhere in the traditional plotting sense. This book is the poster child for soggy middle, and there were so many subplots and conversations that I found myself skimming. There are also many conversational affectations (er, ums) that were pretty distracting.
I understand now why readers describe this as a vampire "romance" in quotes. I really appreciate that the author does some different things with this concept, but she keeps giving a flash of the concept and then pulling her cards away in a way that makes me feel like I'm being baited a bit. If you go into this looking for a romance, prepare to be jerked around.
By today's standards, Sunshine is not a typical genre book and should probably be recommended as a character study that happens to have vampires in it. Parts of it seem almost designed to frustrate the reader. But it is a truly unique vampire book, and if you're into that it's worth checking out.
It manages to be an incredibly slow read and a bit of a slog without crossing over the line to unreadability, but it definitely teeters on the edge. People who enjoy this book sometimes characterize it as a comfort read, but people who are coming at it from a genre fiction angle seem to be largely frustrated by how Sunshine defies a lot of genre and structure conventions.
The initial setup in Act 1 with the vampire is engaging, but we actually see the vampire for very little of the remainder of the book. The rest is filled with info dumps and rambling narrative tangents about life and the world that often don't "go" anywhere in the traditional plotting sense. This book is the poster child for soggy middle, and there were so many subplots and conversations that I found myself skimming. There are also many conversational affectations (er, ums) that were pretty distracting.
I understand now why readers describe this as a vampire "romance" in quotes. I really appreciate that the author does some different things with this concept, but she keeps giving a flash of the concept and then pulling her cards away in a way that makes me feel like I'm being baited a bit. If you go into this looking for a romance, prepare to be jerked around.
By today's standards, Sunshine is not a typical genre book and should probably be recommended as a character study that happens to have vampires in it. Parts of it seem almost designed to frustrate the reader. But it is a truly unique vampire book, and if you're into that it's worth checking out.