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Sunshine by Robin McKinley
01/02/2004 . Source: Jennifer Howell 
pub: Bantam Press/Transworld Books. 389 page paperback. Price: £10.99 (UK) ISBN: 0-593-05102-5. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.booksattransworld.co.uk and www.robinmckinley.com
Rae, called Sunshine, is a coffee-house baker, specialising in Cinnamon Rolls as Big as Your Head. She works in the family business, has a steady boyfriend, an eccentric landlady and one day takes a walk by the lake.
It shouldn't have been dangerous. She certainly didn't expect to be kidnapped by a pack of vampires and shackled in an abandoned mansion with only another, equally shackled, vampire for company. Sunshine, being who she is, definitely doesn't plan on being dinner when he wakes up.
There's a moment, reading the blurb for 'Sunshine', when the resemblance to a certain episode of Buffy springs to mind. Start reading the book and all resemblance to anything else becomes quite completely irrelevant.
McKinley may be a seasoned author with a fair number of well-received fantasies behind her already but this is the book she hits her stride with. The first-person narrative of Sunshine is vastly entertaining, occasionally slightly insane and packed with so much originality and character that you literally do not want to put it down. Even if that means losing a fair amount of sleep until you're done.
Set in the kind of alternaa nice change. No frilly shirts and undead French aristocrats for one. It doesn't matter who they were before they became vampires, they're something else now.
It seems strange to say but I've never read anything quite like this at all. There's not many authors brave enough to write an alternate world/fantasy/SF/horror/romance hybrid with such an individual narrator and to make it work like McKinley does.
It's a more than credible attempt to blend genres that borrows from many sources (Buffy included, I think it's fair to say) and ends up a quite unique, moving and haunting story all its own that leaves you with a curious craving for cinnamon rolls.
Personally, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Jennifer Howell
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