Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Author: Robin McKinley

Reading Level: Adult

Publisher: Speak

Rated 9/10

  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 entre 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."

MY REVIEW
I really didn't know I had found such a gem when I checked this one out at the library.This book kept me going from the very beginning.The story centers around Rae aka Sunshine who one days happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and is kidnapped by a group of vampires and chained to a wall in a house by the lake.Her life soon changes and she learns things she never thought possible.I don't really want to give too much away cuz I want people to enjoy what they read(a book is always better when you have no clue what's coming next)I must say I enjoyed the fact that the vampires are different than what most people make them in todays stories about them.They're repulsive but beautiful at the same time. And vampires and humans are enemies here,there's no falling in love with a human here,they have no human emotions.It's also a lil like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a way.I didn't like the ending though I will admit that, it felt a little rsuhed to me, but I'm definitely now gonna try and read other books by Mrs. McKinley.