Sunshine Review

This week's novel is Sunshine by Robin McKinley.  Vampires!  Cinnamon rolls!

Sunshine, a baker at her family's coffee house known for her cinnamon rolls, drives out to the lake one day, where she is attacked by vampires.  They chain her to the wall of a ballroom in an abandoned mansion as tempting food for the prisoner chained to the opposite wall: a rival vampire.  After two nights and a day imprisoned together, Sunshine uses the magic her grandmother taught her, magic she hasn't though about in years, to escape and help her cell-mate escape too.  She escaped, but now her friends and family are all concerned that she disappeared for two days and came back traumatized, the police in charge of controlling supernatural activity don't believe her when she says she can't remember what happened, and the vampire gang that kidnapped her wants revenge.

The voice makes this book.  Sunshine is so engaging and describes her world and the people in her life with such humorous honesty that it makes even long sections of bakery drama and descriptions of her traumatized wooziness entertaining.  Her voice is colloquial, interrupting herself to hum and wonder how she should phrase things, especially delicate things.

This is a secondary world fantasy with modern(ish) technology, which I am all about.  Everyone knows about the Others, who are various kinds of supernatural monsters, from vampires to demons to were-beasts.  They've recently come out of a war against the Others that has left them in a semi-post-apocolyptic state, where a large part of the population was lost and large sections of land are unusable.  But at the same time, Sunshine's family runs a little bohemian coffee house in a quirky neighborhood that's working to hold off gentrification.  There's a branch of the police that deals with supernatural activity and a thriving business in charms and wards.

I also appreciated that Sunshine's vampire ally is never described as boyfriend material.  She always describes him as her partner when they start working together to combat the rival vampire gang that's after them.  She makes it clear that just being in the same room as a vampire puts you so on edge that it's like being stalked by an apex predator.  She makes it clear that people are only drawn to vampires because they have mind control powers if you look them in the eye, and those instances of coercion are jarringly strange.  With a bit of clarity, Sunshine recognizes that her vampire ally is unattractive in the extreme.  He looks dead with pasty skin and the way he unnaturally moves and unnaturally breathes make her uncomfortable.  It's a nice twist on the vampire story I've always heard, that they're unnaturally attractive.

I enjoyed the side characters and Sunshine's relationships with them were complex and respectful and mature.  Sunshine and her mom bicker constantly, often exploding into screaming matches, but at the same time they love one another unconditionally.  At one point it comes out that Sunshine's best friend has been working for the supernatural police, recruited in part to keep tabs on Sunshine.  But instead of that ruining their relationship, Sunshine hears her out and they start working together to track down the vampire gang.  Sunshine's boyfriend, Mel, gives her space when she doesn't want to talk about her trauma and wakes up in the night screaming, and Sunshine realizes that he's not sharing everything with her either.  She questions if it's a good thing that they give each other so much privacy, but instead of ditching him for her vampire partner, they agree that no matter who they are or what they're hiding, they're always friends and will always support one another.


***

Next week: Ghost Talkers, World War I with ghost soldiers, by Mary Robinette Kowal.