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Rae "Sunshine" Seddon is just an average girl with an average life. She works in a bakery, reads books about "Others", and does movie night with her mom, step-dad, half-brothers, boyfriend and whoever else pops in. This ALL changes one night when she leaves Movie Night to head to the lake. There she is captured by vampires and is imprisoned with another vampire, Constantine. Will she escape? How will her life change?

This book was different than most vampire books I've ever read. Number 1, this is NOT another Twilight clone! (Breathe a sigh of relief, people!) This is a really gritty portrayal of vampires and "part blood" (meaning anything from werewolves to demons). Not once does Rae dreamily wish Constantine would bite her and whisk her away into the sunset. In fact, Rae's boyfriend is a (probably human) chef, with whom she actually has a good relationship (DO NOT FAINT!).

Number 2, Rae as a protagonist is incredibly different from most of the other first person accounts I've ever read. This style is what I would call "stream of consciousness" - Rae's narration is basically whatever is on her mind, regardless of how or if it might even pertain to the plot. This is how we learn that this society is this post-apocalyptic pseudo-waste ground where the threat of vampires (who control a good 1/5 of the world economy - I think, if I remember correctly) is imminent. It's in chunks, hidden much deeper into a novel than a reader is accustomed to. This makes "Sunshine" much more realistic, but also much more frustrating. When I started the book, I thought it would be a fluffy read in the vein of Sookie Stackhouse; by the time I ended, I was in awe of the very gritty very urban fantasy (very NOT paranormal romance) read I got.

I Buddy Read this with an engineering friend of mine, and we both came to the conclusion we liked it, but Rae's narration almost killed it for us. Also, the fact that this is a standalone is a good and bad thing; I really hate these endless series these days, because I never seem to be able to get to book 1, much less book 18. (Unless I hate-listen to Anita Blake, apparently.) On the other hand, if ever there was a book set up perfectly for sequels, this is it. It is the perfect balance of an origin story, leaving some nice little tails dangling, but still closing up all the loose ends in a way that makes you satisfied.

Am I glad I held onto this book through so many moving/shifting genres culls? Absolutely! Would I read it again? Probably not. Would I recommend? Definitely.

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*C.S. Light*

At the end of this story, I thought....whaaa...and heard crickets. The story kind of ends in a cliff hanger, but it also seems final. Some other reviewer on here mentioned the narration style and sections of the book that seemed to drag on, and I totally agree with this assessment. For one thing I kept waiting and waiting for our protagonists to meet again after their initial encounter, but they didn't! For a long, long time. This book is not like every other beauty and the beast, prince and princess meet and fall in love story. This story is about Sunshine; I found that I genuinely liked her and identified with her book reading and cinnamon roll making life. I do highly recommend this book, and will probably reread it some day to see if I catch anything that I missed the first time.

Rae, known by her nickname Sunshine, is a baker at Charlie's coffeehouse in a dystopian world sometime after the Voodoo Wars (a war between humans and Others). Vaguely dissatisfied with her life one day, she takes a ride out to a disused cottage by a lake owned by her family. There she is kidnaped by vampires and taken to another deserted house where she is chained next to another vampire. Con (or Constantine) has also been taken by his enemy Bo, and Rae is supposed to be a moral temptation for him.
The book is told in Rae's first-person POV in a sort of stream-of-consciousness ramble. I had trouble adjusting to it at first, but then became engrossed in the story until about halfway through when it bogged down. Rae's thoughts are often repetitive - there's a lot about her baking - and scattered, jumping off into flights of fancy that go nowhere. I persevered, and the end of the book picked up again.
The worldbuilding here is just amazing. Ms. McKinley has created a world based roughly on New Jersey (I think) populated with familiar and strange places and objects. Money is now 'blinks', computers are comware, towns have been depopulated and abandoned, and so on. There's a lot of fascinating detail as seen through Rae's eyes and speech.
There are also a plethora of fascinating characters. Almost everyone from Charlie (Rae's boss and step-father) to Mel (her boyfriend) to Yolande (her landlady) have hidden facets. Unfortunately, because this story is told from Rae's POV, unless she knows about the other character's lives, we never find out much, especially as Rae seems mostly uninterested in finding out about them. She is one of the most uncommunicative and least inquisitive protagonists I've ever read in a book, especially one written from her POV. She has no idea what's happened to her father and his family, and also doesn't seem to care all that much. She knows there's something weird about her boyfriend's tattoos, but they don't talk to each other except about the coffeehouse and motorcycles, so she (and we) never find out what the tattoos mean. Despite her fascination and bond with Con, we find out very little about him and how he lives. But we learn a lot about cinnamon buns.
I did enjoy this book; it's different from most vampire books, somewhat along the lines of Anne Bishop's The Others series. Ultimately, I thought switching POVs or less of Rae's ramblings would make it a better book. I'd give it 3 1/2 stars.