Just Finished Reading: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

They came out of the night in a place she thought would be safe. Being what they were she never heard a thing until they surrounded her. Fully expecting to die at their hands – or fangs – she was surprised when they carried her deeper into the woods until they finally deposited her, chained to a wall, in a crumbling lakeside mansion. She was, she quickly realised, an offering for the other person (if you can call them people) similarly chained to the wall. Now beyond simple fear she expects to die again before she sees the dawn. Little do her captors realise though what they have brought for dinner. Sunshine is more than they know and even more than she herself suspects. When her mother divorced her father she decided to tell her daughter almost nothing of her heritage. But the simple training passed on by her grandmother will save her life tonight and, if she can stay one step ahead of the creatures eagerly looking for her, may well save a great many more.

To begin with this book kind of threw me a curve – and I mean a dead mans curve. It started out as a vampire abduction novel and then – almost imperceptibly – morphs into something much stranger. I can only describe it as a cross between X-Men and Angel (the Buffy spin-off) plus a whole lot of other vampire/urban fantasy related works. It became clear, after 50-60 pages that this was not, thankfully, the world we know. There were many parallels but many changes too – most notable of which was that magic and supernatural creatures are not only real but recognised and, to some extent at least, legalised and regularised if not exactly embraced by regular society. It is, needless to say a fascinating and scarily dangerous world that I for one wouldn’t even like to visit – except from the safety of my favourite reading chair. Robin McKinley has produced a detailed, well constructed, logical world were magic exists and is, again to an extent, understood by rational scientific people and used by them to counter other darker magic which is an ever growing threat. If this wasn’t enough to grip me (and it would’ve been) the character of Sunshine herself was pretty marvellous. Apart from her need to overanalyse everything – been there, done that – she was outstanding as she tried to come to terms with what happens to her and what she discovers about herself. Peppered throughout are almost equally interesting secondary characters – especially her landlady who is also pretty outstanding – that flesh out the story and bring other aspects of her world to life. After the initial ‘WTF is going on’ feeling this settled down to be one of the best vampire novels of the year for me. Unfortunately it looks like it’s the only Sunshine novel the author has produced which is a great pity. Most certainly one for fans of vampire fiction or for anyone with a love of the fantastic. There is a bit of sex and the odd bit of swearing to contend with but nothing that should bother an adult reader. Highly recommended.