Sunshine in SpecFic Buddy Reads

Dec 05, 2016 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: urban-fantasy, horror, 2016-shelf, fantasy

This was a very welcome surprise coming out of my dire expectations. :)

I mean, a vampire romance. Seriously? Another?

Well stop scratching your head and stop moving on to another title. This happens to be one of the *good* ones. There are lots of elements that you've seen before, I'm sure, but it's all in how its written. McKinley has been writing all kinds of fantasy for over thirty years. She knows how to accomplish a lot in relatively no time at all.

Gorgeous world-building and a populace that This was a very welcome surprise coming out of my dire expectations. :)

I mean, a vampire romance. Seriously? Another?

Well stop scratching your head and stop moving on to another title. This happens to be one of the *good* ones. There are lots of elements that you've seen before, I'm sure, but it's all in how its written. McKinley has been writing all kinds of fantasy for over thirty years. She knows how to accomplish a lot in relatively no time at all.

Gorgeous world-building and a populace that will soon be overrun by vampires. Part-demons and sorcerers waging wars against them. The elemental mastery of the magic is amazing. Sunshine? This isn't just a nickname. :) When these little bits and pieces started unfolding out of the normal bakery life and a nasty kidnapping, I kept thinking to myself: well, isn't this just another setup for a romance?

Yes. BUT. McKinley never stints on complicated and interesting plots that kept me going all the way through. It kind of stunned me just how deep and complex this novel became out of my initial observation. And it's not just the characters, either. The kinds of races, the kinds of magic, the twists and the turns, all of them were added like spice to the novel and it kind of blew me away.

I've read a lot of mediocre vamp novels. I've read a few excellent ones. This one fooled me on it's premise and it's opening. It turned into an excellent one. :)

So what about shelves that call it YA? Why didn't I also do the same? Because she's apparently a quarter of a century old. Long out of HS and working happily in a bakery. That *might* be called a tiny tiny sliver of the new-adult market, but there's a LOT of dark stuff going on here with complicated emotions and reactions. It's definitely not simple and its often beautifully adult. :)

I completely recommend for fans of better vampire novels. (Even ones that feature romance!)

Edit 12/6/16:
It has been brought to my attention that I should clarify what kind of romance this is. It's not Eros. It's Philia. That's the greek term for ppl you'd trust your life for in battle. Deep friendships. Ultimate trust. These two share a lot more than just that. Psychic bonds, the ability to pull one another from the brink even out of outright battle, and he even gives her a wondrous magical item that allows her access to his sanctum of sanctums. That's a level of trust unheard of in a world where all vampires know that they can't trust each other, let alone any other kind of person. :)

So I call it romance in the traditional sense. A huge step up from a buddy-novel, too. :) ...more

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Feb 14, 2022 DivaDiane SM rated it really liked it

Shelves: diane-s-meager-effort, audio, sffbc-book-shelf

4.5 stars - I really enjoyed this.

We find ourselves in a world that seems a bit like ours, but with demons and were-people (werewolves, were-skunks and even were-chickens!), and the most evil “others”; vampires, as well as human magic-handlers, ward creators (that’s not the right word, but I can’t find the term) and part-bloods and a government agency to handle all of them, Others and special humans.

I won’t say more, because that would be spoilery.

McKinley balances the darkness of events with ...more

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May 31, 2017 Emma rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy, urban-fantasy, magic, vampires, horror

Hmm. Where to start? This book was quite unique and strange. I love me a good vampire tale and this certainly was one- vampires are at the centre of the actions of the story. And yet...the point of the book seemed to be more about the world building. This was a fascinating world with many magics and part blood demons, ward makers and charm weavers, a special Others police force...
But while it was fascinating in places, the book seemed to be almost a long information dump. If this was the first ...more

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Dec 31, 2016 Veronique rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read2016

3.5

What a frustrating book! On one side, this is an amazing read. McKinley paints a deeply complex and detailed world peopled by humans, weres, vampires, demons, and people who can wield magic. The feel is very much urban however, but one that has suffered wars and has not yet quite recovered. The author succeeds in conveying such depths that it is only too easy to immerse oneself.

Characters are also brilliantly portrayed, full of subtlety and ambiguity. Rae is very easy to like. Her seemingly ...more

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Dec 05, 2016 Sarah rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audio

As usual, this was not entirely what I was expecting. There are character driven novels and then there are novels where you experience absolutely everything from inside the character's head. This one was surprisingly all about the narrator and her perceptions of everything that is happening. Even the things that are happening outside of herself are happening in a way that never seems to be objective. She's not an unreliable narrator; it's merely a more introspective version of first person. I li ...more

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Dec 22, 2016 Lata rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sf-f-h, auth-f, x2016-read

This was an interesting read. Though my overall reaction was not as enthusiastic as I was hoping it would be, I enjoyed a number of individual aspects of this book:

-There were countless wonderful turns of phrase I loved spoken by the main character Rae/Sunshine (my ereader isn't cooperating at the moment or I'd include some of the quoted sections.)

-Rae was wonderful. I loved her chosen profession, and just how important feeding people was to her, and how much of her perception of herself was tie ...more

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Mar 19, 2021 Alissa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-ebooks

Totally spellbinding. This is not a fluffy read, it managed to both entertain and well, consume me with great balance.

I never saw the author’s hand but in retrospect I feel there was a lot of work behind the scenes, naturally interwoven with the tale; the writing is simply beautiful, it is much more than I was expecting from a vampire tale. I guess it’s more than a vampire story after all. Also, the titular character is the right amount of quirky, Mary Sue-ish, ironic and truly relatable even wi ...more

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Nov 27, 2017 Jackie rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books, 2017-read

Promises of a different type of vampire story, glowing reviews including an awesome blurb by Neil Gaiman and an intriguing plot pretty much suckered me into buying this book for $1.99 on Kindle. Unfortunately, the best I can say about this is book is, “Meh”. Apparently, I missed the mark and only finished because it counted for a challenge.

Sunshine is touted as a quirky and interesting character, but she is just like all the other Mary Sue’s out there. She’s a hot-ish girl that bakes for a livin Promises of a different type of vampire story, glowing reviews including an awesome blurb by Neil Gaiman and an intriguing plot pretty much suckered me into buying this book for $1.99 on Kindle. Unfortunately, the best I can say about this is book is, “Meh”. Apparently, I missed the mark and only finished because it counted for a challenge.

Sunshine is touted as a quirky and interesting character, but she is just like all the other Mary Sue’s out there. She’s a hot-ish girl that bakes for a living, has a motorcycle riding boyfriend, seems to have 1 friend and oh yeah, happens to have an untapped, extremely powerful magical side to her…of course. Other than the magical side and her extreme love of baking cinnamon rolls there was nothing to differentiate her from the millions of other vampire heroines. The story gets interesting once Sunshine is kidnapped by vampires, but this is short-lived as the plot quickly disintegrates into a rambling, info-dumbing narrative. Maybe it could have worked if told from third person perspective, but instead we only have Sunshine’s first person perspective. Being in Sunshine’s head was sometimes brutal. She’s repetitive and plays the Captain Obvious card one too many times. It made me hate first person, especially because her perspective made the climax so damn anticlimactic.

As for the world building, again “meh.” I see many people talking about the world building and how this is a great example, but I heartedly disagree. The world is interesting and different. It’s like almost dystopian with other worldly beings (weres, vampires, daemons, angels, etc.) coexisting alongside humans. But again, too much rambling narrative and not enough showing. I wanted to know more about the Voodoo Wars and how this world came to be. Instead, we get a lot of info-dumping with a lot of made up words (blinks for dollars, globe-net for internet). Save your icing and give me the cake, dammit!

As for the Beauty and the Beast aspect that is showing up in some of the reviews…ugh. This wasn’t a romance by any means. There is a connection between the two characters and potential for there to be a romance, but it’s never developed. I can’t really call this a clean read either. There is an out of the blue, intense, potential sex scene that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. One minute Sunshine is repulsed by vampires and the next she is completely pissed off because she gets rejected by one. According to her, her “c*nt is going to explode,” so to hell with the stable and understanding motorcycle boyfriend who conveniently gets forgotten for the vampire. I’m not a prude by any means but I just can’t with the messy relationships, even more so when it doesn’t make sense.

So yeah, not sure what Gaiman or the other reviewers were thinking when they read this one, but this was not for me.
...more

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Jul 23, 2015 Lindsay rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy, sfbr-book-recommendation

I'm genuinely surprised at how much this book diminished for me on rereading. I had initially given it 5 stars, but I've dropped it to 3 on this reread about 15 years after my original read.

The first part remains one of the best conceptions for a vampire story ever, and the overall world-building in the rest of the novel is quite brilliant, but the basic construction of this novel is terrible.

All of the exposition comes in the second part, and there's a lot. It's easy to see what the backlash th ...more

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Dec 26, 2016 Ctgt rated it liked it

Frustrating. I really enjoyed the concept of the world and the main character, Sunshine, was fantastic. But there was too much introspection, too much living inside the main characters head for my taste. There area ton of unanswered questions concerning the world, the "magic" war that set up the world as it is now, the history of the two warring vampires, the backstory of most of the supporting characters. Generally I enjoy those types of unknowns but that is usually with short stories. If this ...more

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Apr 02, 2018 Helen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is the fourth book I’ve read by this author and each has been so much fun. This is completely different in that it’s set in a post-war time. War with Vampires and others!!

Our lead, Sunshine, lives to bake and I’ve been craving cinnamon rolls throughout. She has a magical heritage which til now has been irrelevant to her life.

The Vampires are not sex-gods, sparkly or even that nice. They are so different that ‘other’ suits them. Except Con, he has an element of ‘niceness’ to him.

My initial ...more

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