“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Bantam (2004)
480 pages

This book was recommended by a number of people, mostly on LJ (and mostly by people who were frothing at the mouth at Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series). I duly borrowed a copy from the library. And my sister read it too, thanks to that quote from Neil Gaiman on the cover. She’s such a Gaiman fan, XD.

I wanted to like this. It ended up just being ok in my list. I have a few problems with it, mostly with the way the narrative jumps. The book is in the first person, Sunshine’s point of view, and written rather colloquially. I don’t have real problems with the POV or even the language; my problem is how information is presented. We need to know more about the world of course, this post-apocalyptic earth where vampires and demons roam, but there’s just too much exposition, and it’s given in chunks. And the narrative goes off in sudden tangents — sometimes for exposition purposes, sometimes just to point out something that catches Sunshine’s fancy at the moment, and sometimes it’s very, very long. She’s about to stab someone with a table knife, and there’s suddenly pages and pages on the virtues of using stakes made of other things — I think it was apple wood and ivy? — instead of stainless steel. It just throws me off. It also made the book unnecessarily bloated.

The asides (in parenthesis) and the many dashes littered across the book made me pause as well. It’s, uh. It’s too much like my own writing, I guess. The day I manage to send an email out without parentheses or em dashes in it will be the day the world ends. I keep trying to break the habit, but it’s hard, and seeing someone so comfortable doing something I’m trying to stop gives me a really bizarre feeling, especially when I realise how distracting those asides are.

I like the character Sunshine. I love her almost obsessive passion with baking and bread and cinnamon rolls, and how much she loves sunshine and how she can soak it all up. I love how she’s normal except when she’s not, and how, despite everything, she wants “to go on making cinnamon rolls”. I like her relationship with everyone at the bakery — Charlie especially, and Mel. Con certainly piqued my interest, but in honest truth I’m glad he wasn’t always there. (My sister wished Con was around more. No, no thanks. This book is about Sunshine, not . . . some vampire romance story. If there was a sequel, then I wouldn’t mind more Con. We need explanations, after all. And I wouldn’t mind, also, more explanation on Mel. Just who is that dude? Also, quite randomly, I keep interchanging him with Hank from Someplace to be Flying when I think of the book, and I’m not certain why. It is possibly because of the tattoos.)

The book can be laugh-out-loud funny at points, thanks to Sunshine’s quirky observations about a lot of things. Though I have to wonder: are Carthaginian hells worse than any other sort of hell? Why the qualifier?

Some things aren’t explained, and the book felt like a set up to something more. I was surprised that there were no plans for a sequel.

Now I shall stay away from vampires. At least for a while.

Someplace to be Flying by Charles de Lint
Orb Books (2005)
384 pages

I’m not much of a fan of urban fantasy. I’m not familiar with Charles de Lint’s work. Someplace to be Flying is the first Charles de Lint novel I’ve read. It’s one of his Newford stories; while related to the other books, it can be read on its own. owlmoose did suggest (somewhere . . . I can’t find that thread anymore; certainly it wasn’t in my LJ) that perhaps the short story collection Dreams Underfoot is the best place to start.

I think my problems with this book starts at the start. As I said, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t read any of the Newford books, but there are so many characters and I felt like I needed charts to tell who is who. And for half of them, even up to the end, I couldn’t see what importance they were to the plot except being eccentric characters who know that something is going on. And to foreshadow stuff, I think.

It’s not to say that the characters aren’t interesting. The crow girls caught my attention at once, and I think I’m a bit in awe of Margaret.

It starts off relatively slow. Lily, a photojournalist in search of the animal people, meets Hank, a cab driver who’s familiar with the slums of Newford. The “animal people” part made me pause, but I went on reading anyway. The story’s format sort of threw me off as well — there are chapters, and then subchapters in the chapters (mostly for point-of-view changes) which came a bit too often for my liking. The other problem was the chunks of text in italics — stories being told, or perhaps flashbacks — that were a bit hard to read, and I found myself skimming through those very fast, and possibly missed some stuff.

Once I got past the first few chapters, I flew through the rest of the book. The premise is interesting, and the mythology woven into the story was a definite plus. The ending left me scratching my head though. Light? Going in, coming out? Huh? I understand what was going on, but I had this disconnected feeling from the whole ending. (I guess I can get lumped with Rory and the other sceptics.)

Other things: Hank/Lily just didn’t work for me. It just keeps fizzling. Jack and Nettie held my interest much longer; pretty much till the end.

.

Oh. WordPress 2.5 is out. Upgrades, here we go — though not now. Tomorrow morning, maybe.