| abstract | - Sunshine is a novel by Robin McKinley. It tells the story of Rae "Sunshine" Seddon, a young woman who works in her stepfather's coffeehouse as a baker. The novel is set in a rather unpleasant alternate reality about ten years after the Voodoo Wars. These wars left the world in rather a mess--"bad spots", effectively magical toxic waste spills, get mentioned several times. The novel begins with a ten-page Info Dump about the title character's life as a coffeeshop baker, followed by five pages of Expospeak about her world's vampires. After that, the book moves on with the plot: she wakes up in the forest, surrounded by vampires, who take her off to a large lake house where they have a rival vampire, Constantine, chained to the wall. Sunshine is being provided as his dinner, as part of an attempt to torture/corrupt his Friendly Neighborhood Vampire tendencies out of him before killing him. Unfortunately for the vampires, Sunshine's father was a sorcerer, and her grandmother taught her to use her heritage to transmute, which lets her make a key for her shackles. Really unfortunately for the vampires, Sunshine's world has elemental magic, and Sunshine's element is, well...such that even though she escapes during the day, she can take Constantine with her. The rest of the book is concerned with fallout from her kidnapping (including a Wound That Will Not Heal Without Vampiric Blood Magic, the intense interest of the Special Other Forces, and partially-faked PTSD), and also with the fact that the gang of vampires who kidnapped her is run by a master vampire, Beauregard, who does not take their escape well. Fortunately for Sunshine, Constantine comes back and helps her deal with the problems, and being a mage with an affinity for sunshine does make it easier to kill the bad vampires, as well as save the good ones...
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