Rae Seddon, nicknamed Sunshine, lives a quiet life working at her stepfather's bakery. One night, she goes out to the lake for some peace and quiet. Big mistake. She is set upon by vampires, who take her to an old mansion. They chain her to the wall and leave her with another vampire, who is also chained. But the vampire, Constantine, doesn't try to eat her. Instead, he implores her to tell him stories to keep them both sane. Realizing she will have to save herself, Sunshine calls on the long-forgotten powers her grandmother began to cultivate in her when she was a child. She transforms her pocketknife into a key and unchains herself--and Constantine. Surprised, he agrees to flee with her when she offers to protect him from the sun with magic. They escape back to town, but Constantine knows his enemies won't be far behind, which means that he and Sunshine will have to face them together.
I really wanted to like this book. I've read it at least three times. Robin McKinley is just one of those writers that are just not very accessible to me. But Sunshine is even harder for me than her other books for a couple of reasons.
One: the info-dumping. Oh, god, the info-dumping. Sunshine is narrated by the titular character, a young twenty-something who is the baker in a Cheers-type bakery/cafe. And while the narration might be a good idea in some cases, as it involves us in her world quickly, sometimes it just. . . stinks. Often in the middle of conversations, Sunshine will begin thinking along a tangent, about the new realities of the post-magic world, or about demon/sorcerer mixes, or about comics she's read about vampires. It's annoying - Sunshine piles on information, without context or relevance. And it happens constantly. I will be halfway through an interrogation and someone will ask Sunshine a question and then five pages about Sunshine's regulars at the bakery will intrude before we get back to the answer. It's a lot of repetition and it drags the story down. And even with all that, there's still huge gaps in my knowledge about the world. What caused the magical wars? How did all this demon blood get mixed into the population in the first place (since even small manifestations of it are so obvious, wouldn't a full-blood demon be infinitely so?), how come everyone in the book has some heretofore unsuspected magical past? Has Sunshine really never asked her boyfriend about his unique and complicated magic tattoos, even after four years of being together?
Additionally, the mental gymnastics never seem to tend to anything. In a series, I could almost forgive the constant, seemingly irrelevant musings. But this is a stand-alone, and there is no pay-off for most of the internal questions.
For example, Sunshine spends pages and pages thinking about the possibility that she is one of the unfortunate demon blood/sorcerer crosses. We find out that 90% are criminally insane, that it manifests at puberty often, but not always, that if she is, she could go bad, etc. etc. ad nauseum, but we never find out if she actually is or not. We know that there is a demon blood test, but Sunshine never even wonders about taking it. She thinks for pages about whether the demon blood came from her mother's side, but spends maybe one sentence wondering just what kind of demon. So it's hard to care about that eternal question, "Is she or isn't she?" because Sunshine herself seems so detached about it. There's no tension there.
Two: for a magic-handler whose element is sunshine, Sunshine sure is morose.
Honestly, the biggest problem with the book is the main character. That sounds like the kiss of death, but it's not, oddly enough. Here, the world that Robin McKinley is interesting enough to suck you in, at least for a while. Plus, Sunshine's weaknesses as narrator and key character are really only terrible when she's thinking. When she simply acts or talks, she's instantly more likable and bearable, and even cool. The introspection - and there is a lot of introspection - is the weakest part of the book. If McKinley had tightened it up a lot - cut some, combined some - then even that could have been an asset, rather than a debit.
Sunshine is not wrapped up very tightly in the end. A lot of things are still open when the final page is turned. Which is to say: if Sunshine had been the first in a series, or even the first of a collection of books set in this world, I would be a lot more cool with it (assuming, of course, that the info-dump-style narration ceases with the next books). But it's meant to stand alone, and the jumble of information dispensed throughout remains just that: a jumble. This type of narrator (morose, detached) is a bad choice for a first-person story.
