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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Robin McKinley

Sunshine by Robin McKinley: B

September 28, 2006 by Michelle Smith

From the back cover:
There are places in the world where darkness rules, where it’s unwise to walk. But there hadn’t been any trouble out at the lake for years, and Sunshine just needed a spot where she could be alone with her thoughts. Vampires never entered her mind.

Until they found her…

Review:
I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this book, since there’s two sides to every point I could make about it. The world Sunshine inhabits was created gradually and pretty thoroughly, and still has a lot of potential for further exploration. However, this was mostly accomplished by tangents in the narration, which could get a little baffling at times and often created paragraphs between one line of a conversation and the next. The characters were generally interesting, though I found some supporting characters (the SOF folk) to be rather indistinguishable. The narration was often quite amusing, but I disliked the random scene where Sunshine refers to her genitalia with the most disgusting word on the planet for same.

Plotting was a little disjointed, too, and I thought the supposed climax was not very climactic. Some elements were never fully explained (perhaps owing to limitations of Sunshine’s own understanding) and sometimes the story would jump ahead to reference something that the reader had not actually seen take place. You’d be reading along about something she’d discovered, and then go, “Wait. When?” and do a bit of flipping and find that it didn’t happen “on camera,” as it were. I was also very frustrated by certain things that she didn’t just ask about, some of which she proceeded to fret over at length. If she had at least thought about and discarded the notion of further inquiry, I’d have been mollified.

The book isn’t bad. If a sequel came out, I would probably read it. But I wouldn’t buy it.

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: Robin McKinley

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