Review: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Book Reviews, Reading

SunshineWow. That was a good book.

It was a lit­tle hard for me to get into at the begin­ning. This excerpt is from the first chap­ter, and if you don’t feel as – jangled? – as I did, per­haps it’s just me. But I kept at it, because there was so def­i­nitely some­thing there.

The book is set in what feels like the near future, in a city called New Arca­dia. The entire world is recov­er­ing from “The Voodoo Wars” (which had noth­ing to do with Voodoo, we’re told), which started about 15 years ago and lasted 6 – 7 years. Whether or not humans always knew that there were Oth­ers among them (vam­pires, were-​​whatsits, half and part-​​blood demons, fallen angels, etc.) is unclear, but the war was roughly between “reg­u­lar” humans and the Oth­ers (vam­pires mostly, it seems?). Vamps are referred to as The Dark­est Others.

I’d love to see some kind of his­tory chart for McKinley’s world, because as one reads, you grad­u­ally real­ize that the cul­tural dif­fer­ences are much larger than what could be explained by 20 years or so of shock­ing rev­e­la­tions and war. Reli­gion doesn’t seem as per­va­sive, although there are ref­er­ences to reli­gious sym­bols in wards. Peo­ple say “Carthagin­ian Hells!” and talk about a big leader being “Odin,” or a tough guy being “Thor.” A cool club is “Spartan.”

I read a lot of fantasy/​urban fantasy/​paranormal fic­tion. I don’t always say much about it, but I find the stan­dard, over-​​romanticized depic­tion of vam­pires to be insipid at best. Pay­ing lip ser­vice to their preda­tory nature isn’t enough. I mean, all humans are preda­tors, right? But vam­pires, if they existed, would be the only thing that might be above humans in the food chain. That would make them the enemy of humans. One of the only ways in which I agree whole­heart­edly with Anita Blake is that I am not food.

McKin­ley gets that. She shows vam­pires as mon­sters. They are not pretty, much less sexy – they can’t even pass for human, no mat­ter how recently turned they are or how recently they’ve fed. They’re mot­tled, gray-​​skinned night­mares that don’t move right and smell wrong (like rot­ting dead things, in fact). They give off a pres­ence that imme­di­ately puts humans into a pan­icky state. Their voices are even wrong, and some­times painful. They have a type of glamor that helps them sub­due their prey, but they don’t give their vic­tims any plea­sure or even pre­tend to do so.

Sun­shine goes way beyond a mon­ster story, though. There’s still grey between the black and the white, and it’s impor­tant. There’s also beau­ti­ful light, and a lot of love is demon­strated amongst Sunshine’s extended family/​friend net­work. Plac­ing much of the story in a fam­ily cof­fee­house was a great move. I can’t think of any other set­ting that would be so warm, wel­com­ing, safe, and have rea­sons for other peo­ple to wan­der in and out. (She really should have included recipes, though. It was cruel for her to have described some of Sunshine’s bak­ery treats to peo­ple who can’t taste them!)

I’m feel­ing a bit frus­trated, because it seems as if McKin­ley is done with this world. Mind, the book stands alone absolutely mar­velously! It needs no sequel. There’s cer­tainly room for one or more, though. It’s some­thing of a shock to run into a sin­gle­ton book any more.

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Permalink | July 9th, 2008

One Response to “Review: Sunshine by Robin McKinley”

  1. Hope Says:
    July 9th, 2008 at 9:50 pm

    Oh, sounds delight­ful — and I’m a sucker for fic­tion with good descrip­tions of food :)