Sunshine: Robin McKinley

Been a while. My new work laptop isn't compatible with Blogger. Needless to say, its working now.





Sunshine: Robin McKinley

This is a book review that is long overdue. This is one of my favorite books of all time as evidenced by the abuse it has endured after countless times ending up as my pillow.
   
    Sunshine is best classed as a dark fairytale/fantasy. Robin McKinley has made a name for herself rewriting and expanding fairy tales, including Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood, some original fairy tales, and several versions of Beauty and the Beast. She excels in creating fully-realized worlds and expanding out motivations behind the inevitable fairytale events. In addition she is often able to introduce unpredictable twists despite re-writing a predictable fairytale.
    I should interject here to say that a fully realized world allows me to slip into the world and accept a suspension of disbelief. There are rules governing actions even in this real world – someone in the habit of gossiping is not going to refrain from passing on a juicy bit of gossip for no reason whatsoever. Likewise, within the framework of a story, a gossip will not refrain from passing on a juicy bit of gossip just because the plot requires the main character to remain in ignorance. If the plot depends on characters breaking character for no reason beyond continuing the plot, then it is badly written. Likewise, if someone thing the world appears to exist despite the accepted universe, it annoys me badly. There have been very few moments that have sent me into as much of a height of fury as seeing fireworks in the bows-and-arrows forest technology of the Prince Caspian’s Narnia.
    Robin McKinley is a master of creating coherent universes and characters which behave according to the accepted structure of that universe. Sunshine is set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, in which humans exist side-by-side with non-human known as demons. Humans and demons (and all the crosses thereof) live in stark opposition to vampires. McKinley’s vampires are horror creatures – faster than humans, stronger than humans, and antithetical to everything that means being human (also, thank you Ms. McKinley for your wonderful vocabulary. I learned that word from Sunshine). It is rumoured that vampires have better technology than humans, and the only thing keeping them from taking over the world is the minor fact that the sizzle in the sunlight. There is no magic in the world that has been discovered that allows a vampire to walk in sunlight.
    The story is unique among McKinley’s works in that it is told in first-person narration. The narrator is Sunshine, a book-loving coffeehouse baker with a latent magic talent based on sunlight. The story opens with her explaining to the reader why on earth she went out to a secluded lake one night, where she was subsequently captured by vampires. The entire story is based on explaining to the reader why she is still alive. Nobody escapes from vampires.
    The world is disclosed to the reader in asides and tangents by Sunshine. She’s an eccentric character and the story is told in a way that truly reflects her mind and the shape of her thinking. It’s the narration of someone who is vividly remembers some aspects and doesn’t remember others as well.. She tells things in a very human and un-rehearsed way, with asides as she realizes the reader may not have enough relevant information to understand what she’s talking about, tangents as she follows her thought processes out to their completion, and sometimes forgetting to put minor facts into the story in chronological order and going back to flesh out the detail. It comes across as thought through by someone who has had to process this entire story mentally, but a bit disorganized as you would expect from her personality. The narrative style truly brings Sunshine to life.
    That said, I suspect the narrative style will cause people to either love or hate this story. I love it because all the asides and only semi-relevant information truly fleshes out the world, but it creates a lot of exposition for those people who don’t mentally build the world as they are reading. There is action, but there is a lot of discussion too. The story is not a neatly wrapped package with all the loose ends tied up. Sunshine isn’t the kind of person to tie bows – she needs to get the job done and a knot will work so she ties a knot, loose ends be damned. One of the reasons I love this story is because it ends right after a major piece of action but before all the fallout of the action becomes known. You do not find out how all the characters react, and you know that there are still fireworks to come. One of the best parts of this book is that the world and characters are so fully fleshed out that it is possible to speculate on what happens next. If the author never writes a second part, I will hunt her down in whatever life comes next and demand to know what happens next, simply so that I can see how close my mental images of the aftermath mesh with what actually happened. This story was made for fanfiction. Someday I will look some up, or write some if it fails to exist (I can’t imagine that it would fail to exist though). It would certainly be interesting to chronicle here some of the best fanfiction which manages to follow the rules of the universe.