Type of bind: Hardcover
Brand: Remainder
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Berkley Books
Manufacturer: Berkley Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: September 01, 2003
Publishing house: Berkley Books
Sale Popularity Level: 787098
Studio: Berkley Books
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Product Description:
A new direction for an already successful fantasy author.
They took her clothes and sneakers. They dressed her in a long blue gown. And they shackled her to the wall of an abandoned mansion-within easy reach of a figure stirring in the moonlight.
She knows that it is a vampire.
She knows that she's to be his dinner, and that when he is finished with her, she will be dead. Yet, when light breaks, she finds that he has not attempted to harm her. And now it is he who needs her to help him survive the day...
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Rated by buyers 
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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...
Rated by buyers 
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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 very 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 subsequent 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.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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 humour 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.
Rated by buyers -
This book is Robin McKinley's emotional masterpiece. What other reviewers seem to fail to acknowledge is that in reading this book, if you have ever been able to identify the times in your life you pulled the covers over you head after the alarm went off and those feelings associated with being human and being stubborn, then you can identify with Sunshine. We all prefer to read books that read how things should go. Every character is in a neat little easy pocket and every sub plot is explored and explained thoroughly.
But this isn't a detective novel, it's one woman's thoughts as she deals with a mid 20s crisis and the end of her world as she knows it. She has fears, that aren't rational, that never come true. She has urges, and hopes that in perfect situations, would work out and never bring about a moment of awkwardness, but because this book reads like someone living in a real time, things do get awkward and upsetting and don't make sense.
This book is so human that when I very first read it and let myself be absorbed by Sunshine's plight, I put the book down 3/4s of the way through and realised I had FELT sick I had FELT like I was experiencing what Sunshine was experiencing, without knowing exactly that's what had been happening.
I don't think Robin McKinley wrote this intending a classic sequel, to be honest, I don't think she writes any novel with that in mind. If she did, we'd have series from her, not a dozen stand alones. I think she wrote it so that she could put to paper an alternative world where things are more mystical and yet just as simple and human as the world we are in now. I think she wrote it intending to bring a different kind of heroine to life, who didn't know what she wanted all the time, and didn't have some straight arrow path to follow.
If you loved Hero and the Crown and you want more saucy stubborn heroine with more talent in her pinky than the others around her, then you will love Sunshine doubly more. Period.
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