Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

This is the third time I've read this book this year-- which I never do. There's always another book to read, you know, and more from the same author that I haven't read yet. But this one is so worth it.

This is Robin McKinley's first almost-now novel (that I'm aware of), and it works just as well as her awesome other-world novels. Maybe because it kind of is an other world, even if it seems pretty much like ours at the beginning. Sunshine works at a bakery, making cinnamon rolls (which she mentions incessantly) and not doing much else, other than drinking tea and reading smutty vampire romances. Except, vampires are real, and almost nothing is known about them because people don't ever survive encountering them. And there was a war some years ago, which left alot of the world population dead, almost all the cities destroyed or emptied, and just about eliminated country living, because it left big 'bad spots' that crack people's psyches, as well as giving the countryside over to gouls and weres.

When she goes out to clear her head by a lake she used to visit as a kid, Sunshine is kidnapped and chained to a wall for two days in the company of a vampire her captors (also vampires) want to torture. Instead of being the last meal for him, he exercizes amazing self-control and they sort of get to know eachother-- and the stress reawakens her own transutation abilities that she hadn't used or thought of in decades. She cam change things that shouldn't be changable, and it allows them to escape, because part of the power is that she can shield a single vampire from the sun. Against all odds and all logic, she gets him out and he gets her home, and they go their separate ways, but not before he makes sure she won't die in her sleep, and not before he finds himself in her debt.

That first part is my favorite part of the book.

After this, there's alot of waiting, as she tries to heal from the post-traumatic stress of what happened, and wonders how she was able to do waht she does, and wonders whether she's tainted by demon blood and if that means she's going to go crazy. She goes back to work, and she deals with this vampire-inflicted wound that won't heal, and she doesn't know what else to do. This part could have been really dull, what with it mostly not going anywhere, but Sunshine is such an engaging character and the world is so clearly defined, I don't mind that nothin is happening. I want to read through it at the same pace Sunshine's thinking.

The second half of the book has her getting healed by the return of Con (the vampire), who she calls up accidentally when she's at her rope's end and doesn't know what else to do, and he discovers that the cut they gave her was poisoned-- and that it was supposed to poison him, except that he didn't give in and eat her. And it has her semi-recruited as an agent of SOF / Special Other Forces when she manages to not only sense a vampire nearby when no one else does, but to kill it with an ordinary table knife. They get her to help her friend track emails across this world's modified internet, trying to find the ones that are written by vampires, and she proves to be really good at it. So good at it that she learns how to travel through a sort of un-space between realities that apparently no one else has ever traveled through before. This comes in handy when it's her time to save Con, after he's depleted by his healing of her and can't save himself. And there's a moment there that's really really hot.

Then they go after the Big Bad and somehow manage to both win and survive, and the bond between them is fixed-- he chooses to stay with her even though he could leave if he wanted to, and she chooses to stay with him, because she's figured out that you can have it both ways. And I love that. I never really liked that the heroine has to always give up everything for her love, or that the hero has to give up his life for her; this way, they can keep their lives, keep themselves, and still share in whatever it is they have.

It's a great book. It's wandering and strange and weirdly paced, but all that serves to show how strange Sunshine's life is getting, rather than to make the story unreadable. It goes back to McKinley's fondness for the Beauty and the Beast trope, and sort of mixes the two up together, finding commonality in things that should be antitheses, and making it work. And I want to know what happens next. She doesn't do returns or sequils, and that makes me sad, because this is a story that still has things to say, still has chapters left-- but the fact that she'll probably never tell them sort of makes them special, like a favorite show that was canncelled after only one perfect season: there's nothing to make it less than the perfection it is, no other memories to foggy it up. And that's beautiful.