Sunshine, a fantasy by Robin McKinley published in 2003 and reissued in 2008, won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature (McKinley’s acceptance remarks here). I regret very much reading the screed against readers which the author posted on her blog. I’m sure we all feel that way at times about the people we deal with, but I think it says something when you let those kinds of comments stand as a public statement of your relationship with your audience. As a reader who just discovered McKinley and went to her website to find out more about her and her books, I felt insulted, slightly pissed, and deflated. I am not sure that’s what I would be going for with my author website.

But I will leave off that distressing discovery, surprising and interesting as it is, and talk about Sunshine, which was also surprising and interesting, but in a good way. I listened to Sunshine, which is written in the first person. First person often works quite well on audio, and the performer did a great job with it. Sample here.

I finished this book last week, but have had a hard time starting the review. And then I read this blurb by Neil Gaiman and figured out why:

A gripping, funny, page-turning pretty much perfect work of magical literature that exists more or less at the unlikely crossroads of Chocolat, Interview With a Vampire, Misery and the tale of Beauty and the Beast. It’s not quite SF, and it’s not really horror, and only kind of a love story, and it’s all three while still being solidly Fantastique.

Sunshine is the story of Rae — nicknamed Sunshine — a twenty something baker, content with her life working in her step-father’s cafe, where her boyfriend Mel is one of the cooks. She has the usual family issues, including a very strained relationship with her mother, and when she decides to head out one day to the lake to get away, Rae ends up being captured by vampires and brought to an abandoned mansion. The Others are known to exist in Rae’s world, where wars have decimated cities, and they include witches and demons, but vampires are the most feared and hated.

When Rae discovers she has been captured to provide a yummy temptation for Constantine, a vampire who is also a prisoner, she is sure this is the end. But Rae relearns some sorcery her grandmother had taught her as a child, and she and Con are able to escape. She learns that her father, whom her mother left and who has never been in her life, is (or was? We never know for sure.) a powerful sorcerer. Rae and Con now have a kind of bond, which develops as they realize they have to battle the vampire who held them captive if they ever hope to return to some semblance of a normal life.

In the meantime, The SOF — Special Other forces, a kind of CIA dedicated to the eradication and/or neutralization of Others — are interested in the events at the lake mansion, and in Rae’s mystical powers. Sensing an alliance with SOF is not in her — and certainly not in Con’s — interest, Rae has to finesse her relationship with them, while also keeping her family in the dark. She is confused about her growing relationship with Con, a creature she is supposed to revile, but who grows on her in unexpected ways.

Well, not entirely unexpected. The author mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an inspiration, and when a book has a female protagonist who has unexpected powers to fight the bad vamps alongside the one good vamp, who may or may not become her boyfriend, all the while keeping her concerned mother and regular human friends in the dark and keeping her normal human life afloat … well…

And yet, it feels worlds away from Buffy. For one thing, this is not a funny book (with all due respect to Gaiman). And Rae is not very likable.  She’s extremely egocentric, not just in that she’s most concerned for her own welfare, but in that she really doesn’t even think about much that doesn’t directly relate to herself. She isn’t funny or sharp or that insightful. So when you are in this book, you have to be willing to be deep inside the head of a very ordinary person. A person who is probably much more like you, the reader, than most protagonists.

For another, very little happens in this book. There’s the gangbusters kidnapping and escape in the opening chapters, which for my money was the best part of the book. But the next big action is the climax. There are several hundred pages in between of just sort of being with Rae in her world, as she copes with the events out on the lake, tries and fails to go back entirely to her old life, and eventually becomes a new, better and stronger person. But she knows herself, and I really liked that about her:

One of the things you need to understand is that I’m not a brave person. I don’t put up with being messed around, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. The short version of that is that I’m a bitch. Trust me, I can produce character references. But that’s something else. I’m not brave. Mel is brave. His oldest friend told me some stories about him once I could barely stand to listen to, about dispatch riding during the Wars, and Mel’d been pissed off when he found out, although he hadn’t denied they happened. Mom is brave: she left my dad with no money, no job, no prospects—her own parents had dumped her when she married my dad, and her younger sisters didn’t find her again till she resurfaced years later at Charlie’s—and a six-year-old daughter. Charlie is brave: he started a coffeehouse by talking his bank into giving him a loan on his house back in the days when you only saw rats, cockroaches, derelicts, and Charlie himself on the streets of Old Town.

I’m not brave. I make cinnamon rolls. I read a lot. My idea of excitement is Mel popping a wheelie driving away from a stoplight with me on pillion.

Another really great thing about this book is the way the Others and magic are described. The vampires are really really awful — including Con. They look terrifying, smell bad, move in ghastly ways. In this, McKinley keeps much closer to older vampire mythology than the latest heartthrob vamps. But I especially loved the way in which Rae’s growing sense of her own magical powers is described. For once, the magic felt to me, not like a Hollywood special effect, but truly magical:

I watched the wiggling bark. It occurred to me that this was new. I’d been seeing into shadows, but merely what was there, as if there was a rather erratic light on it. This was something else. Which gave me something I could bear to think about, so I thought about it. A few more minutes passed and it seemed to me it was as if I was watching the tree breathing. I found a leaf in shadow, and looked at it for a while; it twinkled, as if with tiny starbursts, but rather than thinking ugh—weird, I kept watching, till there seemed to be a pattern. I thought, it’s as if I’m watching its pores opening and closing. I looked down at my hands. The shadows between the fingers gleamed like a banked fire. The tiny shadows laid by the veins on the backs of them were a tiny, flickering dark green edged with a tinier, even more flickering red. The daylight part of the veins looked as it always did. In the shadow places I could see the blood moving.

I was sitting in sunlight, not shade. I automatically chose sun if there was any sun to be had. I remembered the sun on my back the first morning at the lake, like the arm of a friend. I closed my eyes.

Sunshine feels very much like the first book in a series. So little happens in its pages, compared to similar books in the subgenre, that it’s a shock when it ends as abruptly as it does. As a reader, I have had almost no contact with anyone besides Rae. I wanted to know more about her boyfriend Mel, her stepfather, her mother — who is virtually nonexistent — her powerful father and his family — also nonexistent.

I am on the fence about this. Part of me feels like the book is half baked, that some of these things really should have been explored to make the story complete. We don’t even get to know much about Constantine, and nothing about whether his odd alliance with Rae will become an intimate friendship, a romance, or something else. The other part of me just enjoyed the wonderful writing and marveled at how fresh this author could make an oft-told story feel.