Sunshine
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4.3 • 201 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A small-town baker uses her magic to confront a post–vampire apocalypse world in this award-winning fantasy Neil Gaiman called “pretty much perfect.”
Although it had been mostly deserted since the Voodoo Wars, there hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake for years. Rae Seddon, nicknamed Sunshine, head baker at her family’s busy and popular café in downtown New Arcadia, needed a place to get away from all the noise and confusion—of the clientele and her family. Just for a few hours. Just to be able to hear herself think.
She knew about the Others, of course. Everyone did. And several of her family’s best regular customers were from SOF—Special Other Forces—which had been created to deal with the threat and the danger of the Others.
She drove out to her family’s old lakeside cabin and sat on the porch, swinging her feet and enjoying the silence and the silver moonlight on the water.
She never heard them coming. Of course, you don’t when they’re vampires.
Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sookie Stackhouse will cheer for this tough and quirky heroine. In Sunshine, which won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, McKinley has a vampire novel that is “a smart, funny tale of suspense and romance” (San Francisco Chronicle).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Buffyesque baker Rae "Sunshine" Seddon meets Count Dracula's hunky Byronic cousin in Newbery-Award-winner McKinley's first adult-and-then-some romp through the darkling streets of a spooky post Voodoo Wars world. Now that human cities have been decimated, the vampiric elite holds one-fifth of the world's capital, threatening to control all the earth in less than 100 years, unless human SOFs (Special Other Forces) can hold them at bay by recruiting Sunshine, daughter of legendary sorcerer Onyx Blaise. As breathlessly narrated by Sunshine herself, the Cinnamon Roll Queen of Charlie's Coffeehouse, in the inchoate idiom of Britney, J. Lo and the Spice Girls, Sunshine's coming-of-magical-age launches when she is swarmed by noiseless vampires one night and chained in a decrepit ballroom as an entr e for mysterious, magnetic, half-starved Constantine, a powerful vampire whose mortal enemy Bo (short for Beauregard) shackled him there to perish slowly from daylight and deprivation. Most of the charm of this long venture into magic maturation derives from McKinley's keen ear and sensitive atmospherics, deft characterizations and clever juxtapositions of reality and the supernatural that might, just might, be lurking out there in "bad spots" right around a creepy urban corner or next to a deserted lake cabin. McKinley knows very well and makes her readers believe that "the insides of our own minds are the scariest things there are." (Oct. 7)
Customer Reviews
A favorite
This book has been a favorite since I got it the day it was released.
Sunshine
This is my favorite human-meets-vampire story. I have had a copy for years, and enjoy re-reading it from time to time. I'm pleased to have it on my iBooks.😀
3 Stars and here’s why
I wanted to like this book. I don’t know whether I do or don’t. I give it 3 stars for technicality. It was very, almost.... I don’t have a word to describe it, but more so an analogy. It’s like a series of bunny trails. Like someone telling a story and forgetting to tell certain parts until further into the story, and over telling parts that aren’t really necessary. It’s like run-on thoughts. I will say that I give the idea of the story a 4 stars. It was gripping enough that I really wanted to finish it. But quite disappointing at the end. But, I’m not a believer in always having a good or ideal ending in books. I like finding a book that what I wanted did not happen at the ending. Unassuming. Unpredictable. But interesting. I cannot deny that I wished for a sequel (and searched for one) so that I could possibly still have what I wanted. I’d say it’s worth the 2 bucks spent, all in all.