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Book Review: Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

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One night Rae feels like she needs to get away from everyone, including her family and boyfriend, and have some space to think, so she goes out for a drive by the lake. There she is kidnapped by a group of vampires. They take her to a heavily guarded house by the lake and put her in a room with another vampire, who is chained to the wall, yet able to reach her. Rae is clearly meant to be food, so she is surprised when the vampire doesn’t devour her immediately, and instead asks her to talk to him. But he isn’t like other vampires, and, it turns out, Rae isn’t like other humans either.

 
Sunshine is a very strange book to review. I enjoyed it immensely but was also really annoyed by it! The plot is quite an unusual one as the bulk of the story takes place after Rae escapes the vampires and explores the effect this has on her life. Though she claims that she can’t remember anything, and tries to convince herself that life will continue as normal, supernatural law enforcement officials that she has known all her life start turning their attention to her, eager to find out what happened that night. Her mother starts leaving protection charms around. And the vampire that she was held prisoner with hasn’t disappeared either.

There’s a lot of detail in this book. Rae goes off on a lot of tangents, which some readers don’t like, but I loved it. I really enjoyed all the different elements that were brought into the story. The world building and characterisation was excellent and I was desperate to find out what Rae would do and what would be revealed about each character in the end.

And then it just stops.
And not in the first-book-in-a-series cliffhanger kind of way.
At The End of the story, almost nothing has been explained, let alone resolved. The one major relationship has developed, but that’s it.
It’s extremely frustrating. It seems like there is so much interesting material left to explore, but to the author, the most interesting part, that relationship, has developed, so that’s the end of the book. To her it’s a love story, but to me, it could have been a lot of other things as well. It could have been an epic about the end of the world. It could have been the best urban fantasy series I’d ever had the privilege of reading.
I respect the right of the author, who is extremely talented, to tell the story she wants to tell. But at the same time I can emphasise with all those people who find Sunshine annoyingly long-winded. I loved the detail, but when most of it turns out to have no bearing on the ending, it seems unnecessary. 
Would I recommend Sunshine? Yes, if you love urban fantasy and like vampires to be properly terrifying, and if you want to see some really interesting ideas, or if you enjoy reading about unusual romantic relationships. But if you like to have mysteries explained, don’t get your hopes up about the ending.

I would more broadly recommend Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End, which is also full of interesting characters but has a much tighter ending. I’ve also read Beauty, which is extremely popular, but I didn’t like it as much as Spindle’s End.

Book Review: Beauty, by Robin McKinley

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Beauty is a retelling of the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, in first person, from the point of view of Beauty. The storyline is pretty much the same as in the traditional story but some details are changed.

Beauty is a nickname, her real name is Honour but as a child she decided that she’d rather be called Beauty, and the name stuck. She does not, however, consider herself beautiful. Beauty likes riding horses and reading, and when her father’s business fails and one of her sisters marries, the whole family moves out of the town to start a new life in the countryside, and Beauty finds herself very capable at manual labour. Then news comes from town that one of the ships Beauty’s father owned may have returned, and he goes out to see if this is true. On the way home he becomes lost, and finds his way to the home of the beast.

This book does an excellent job of fleshing out the characters of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, making them more real. Beauty’s sisters are not ugly caricatures here, which I liked, and the magical castle in which the Beast lived was a fascinating place to see described.

This is probably the best-loved of Robin McKinley’s books, the first of her novels to be published, I was recommended it several times before I finally picked it up in a library sale. However, I preferred her more recent novel, Spindle’s End, which I read before Beauty (review coming soon). Most readers seem to think Beauty the better book, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. Beauty is an interesting but pretty passive heroine, and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ was never one of my favourite stories – it’s basically a romanticisation of Stockholm syndrome! The Beast in Beauty is just like the one in the original tale – he holds Beauty hostage in the hope that she will fall in love with him, and I just couldn’t see him as a hero. I also found Beauty to be too obsessed with the way she looks, and was disappointed that in the end she does become “beautiful” (which means taller and more mature looking), I would have preferred to see her get over it!

I think anyone who loves the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ will really enjoy this, but if you always found the plot of the original to be a bit thin, you won’t like it so much. This is a book aimed at children, I’d say pre-teens onwards would be best suited to it, but many adults have enjoyed it as well.