Customer Rating: 
Summary: Cinnamon and chocolate, meet blood and death...
Comment: 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 humor 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: To love this book is to love being enveloped in a story
Comment: 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 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.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good start, then fizzles out
Comment: I heard a review of Sunshine on NPR, saying it was a good airplane book. I had a flight and nothing to read, so I picked it up.
The book starts out well. McKinley draws the reader into what seems like a normal world that's just a little off, and it gradually gets stranger and stranger. When the first REALLY BAD THING happens, you are hooked.
Unfortunately, that's when the book loses steam. McKinley has this annoying habit of breaking up conversations between the characters with explanatory background paragraphs. This can be a useful device when used sparingly, but for McKinley it is the rule. Whenever two characters get together you can expect a short conversation to be spread out over a half dozen pages. Snore. Continuity and pace are destroyed. Yes, I appreciate that this is a detailed alternate world, and McKinley has fleshed it all out in her mind. But sometimes an author should let the back story remain back story and just give the reader enough information to glean the rest by the flow of the front story.
And speaking of characters, the BIG BAD VILLAIN is entirely flat. He's out there lurking through the whole book, and we know he's BAD. REALLY BAD. PURE EVIL. And really uninteresting. We know he hates the good vampire. We never find out why, and the heroine seems uninterested as well. The good vampire is also flat. Once McKinley has drilled into our heads for the 100th time that good vampires are impossibly unusual, his character doesn't change. Nor do we learn why he's decided to be good. For McKinley, it's enough to establish who is wearing the white and black hats, then let them duke it out (with lots of stinky, gooey blood).
The book raises many questions that it never answers. That's fine, I don't mind a little mystery, even after the end. But by then the pace has become so tedious that I'm no longer even curious. What happened to Dad? Grandma? Why does the super bad SOF agent just spring up out of nowhere in the last 100 pages, with no explanation of her motivation? But McKinley doesn't concern herself with this. As long as the reader knows which side the characters are on, we can slog on.
Characters come and go for no apparent reason. Some are featured early, and then are just ignored. Others pop up later, and then are forgotten. Since this is told as a first person narrative, it makes the heroine appear self absorbed, and thus less likable. The conclusion is that the author doesn't care about the secondary characters, so they remain cardboard cutouts.
Part of the reason the story fails is that nobody we care about ever gets hurt. I should rephrase that, because McKinley never develops a character enough for us to actually care about. But the bodies that pile up at an ever faster pace are anonymous. So there's no sense that any named character is ever in any real danger. No danger means no suspense. No suspense means rather dull vampire novel.
The shame here is that McKinley has created a rich setting for a great story. But a great story needs great characters, and there are none here. Two approaches would have vastly improved this novel. Either trim off 100 pages of unneeded detail and give the novel some much needed pace, or add 100 pages of character development and give the novel some much needed depth. As it stands, it is frustratingly in the middle.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very dark
Comment: the book is not really about the event of Sunshine being taken by the vampire but more of the aftermath. it is dragged out a lot. we read about her emotions and life style more than anything else. shes sounds totally traumatized and is unable to connect with anyone she used to love. the scenes that involve her family or boyfriend or even friends are very short and written as if the author doesn't want us thinking about them
the language was nasty too. i actually got this book from my high school library. Imagine that.. and they are questioning The Chocolate War? they should take a look at this book.
if it had been a bit shorter and the unimportant stuff left out i would have liked it. Sunshine's depression and emotional thoughts get a bit boring.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Book with a Bite
Comment: As a choco-holic I had no problem relating to this book; it was awesome! I think those who rated this book poorly simply can't appreciate the writing style. Its understandable because even as heavy a reader as I am Mrs. Mckinley had me re-reading a few pages. But, at least for me, that is part of the appeal: actually having to concentrate on what is on the page. Once you get past the nuances of the style though the plot is terrific: its a classic man vs nature and man vs himself (or herself) under some very odd circumstances. Overall I found Sunshine very enjoyable and throughly developed.
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