Sunshine by Robin McKinley

For some reason the irony of reading a vampire book called Sunshine did not hit me until I picked it up fromt he library. I can be dense sometimes.

I really liked how it started off. The reader doesn't really know they're in an alternate reality from their own until the vamps show up. Then it's suddenly 'this is not the book you thought you were reading". That was cool. The psychological battle during the captive scenes of Part 1 were also cool. Once part one was over though, the book became very formulaic for me.

The"all vampires are evil and we must destroy them but there's this one who's kind of nice and for some reason he's going to help our heroine destroy his peers AND there's going to be weird but unfufilled sexual tension between them" has been done. And it's not my favorite vamp device.

Then there were these two things that bugged me. One, I understand not stopping the story to explain everything about this world that the story takes place in and generally I appreciate authors not believing their readers are so stupid that they can't infer things by context, but to explain so little that the reader is begging for more details about how magic, wards, the "paranormal police" operate can be just as frustrating. It can feel like you are reading the middle of a series and you missed all the explanation in previous books. Two, the same holds true for slang. Making up your own slang as an author gives an otherworldly feeling to the story and prevents the book from feeling dated. But IT HAS TO MAKE SENSE IN CONTEXT. I must have read this passage over a dozen times and I just can't figure out what the author was trying to convey.

Jesse and Pat would be trained in hand-to-hand, and even amok, and thor as hell with the muscles you get if you bash The Blob into trays of cinnamon rolls every morning.

My last issue may or may not be valid. I may be reacting to the latest Laurell K Hamilton books where the plots (what little there is left of them) have slowed to a crawl because of this same issue. We spent so much time inside Sunshine's head that the action seemed secondary and unreal. That was my basic reason for not really digging the book after part one. It worked in part one. It did not work for me in the rest of the book. I kept being like"stop thinking about it and DO something", to both the main character and the author.

So there it is. Sorry that I cannot read vamp books cleanly anymore, but I haven't been able to do that in years. They still all fall into categories for me, and it's ususally a matter of which cliche they become.

Strangely enough I was in a bookstore immediatley after I finished Sunshine while another woman was begging the booksellers for "books like Sunshine". I couldn't belive the stupid advice they were giving her. Anyway, my advice for books like this one would be Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night and Traveling with the Dead and Mercedes Lackey's Children of the Night (this is a series but I haven't read the others, last I knew it was out of print, but that no longer seems to be true). No, I didn't offer my advice. I did not work there and was not being paid. No, it's not very nice, but there is a certain point where you must go, I don't work here and I don't need to help customers. Just like I don't need to straighten their shelves either.