Sunshine
Sometimes you find out that one of your favorite authors has written about one of your favorite topics and you end up with a new favorite book. It's one of the best experiences you can have as a reader - when a book perfectly meets your sky-high expectations.
I started reading Robin McKinley years ago for her fantastic retellings of classic fairy-tales. She's great at taking the traditional damsel in distress and giving her enough strength and motivation to solve her own problems. And those strengths are less about fighting and more about family and friendship and nurturing. They're traits that are traditionally seen as feminine being raised to heroic status because it's through them that the princess saves the day.
So when I found out she'd turned her focus to vampires for a book, I knew I had to get my hands on it. If you didn't grow up with Buffy, it's perhaps strange to describe a vampire book, particularly one where the vampires are definitely scary, inhuman monsters, as cozy. But this was a cozy book.
Rae "Sunshine" Seddon is content with her life as a baker. Well, maybe not completely content, but it really doesn't take her long at all to learn Dorothy's classic lesson that there's no place like home. Getting kidnapped by vampires and learning she has a stronger connection to magic than she'd previously thought is enough to make her embrace her normal life baking bread and sweets.
But that's just the first bit of the book. Of course she gets dragged back in to the vampire drama, thanks to her unique heritage and abilities. Her resistance and reluctance are both believable and handled well. Rather than making the story feel like it's dragging, they make Rae more relatable.
Beyond Rae is an incredibly detailed world. My biggest frustration with the book is that this doesn't get explored to the extent that it could, and the book ends with a whole lot of questions unanswered. It could easily function as the first book to a series. Who knows, maybe there will be a sequel some day. Until then I'm actually pretty content with this book as is. It's almost better to fill in some of the blanks myself.
I started reading Robin McKinley years ago for her fantastic retellings of classic fairy-tales. She's great at taking the traditional damsel in distress and giving her enough strength and motivation to solve her own problems. And those strengths are less about fighting and more about family and friendship and nurturing. They're traits that are traditionally seen as feminine being raised to heroic status because it's through them that the princess saves the day.
So when I found out she'd turned her focus to vampires for a book, I knew I had to get my hands on it. If you didn't grow up with Buffy, it's perhaps strange to describe a vampire book, particularly one where the vampires are definitely scary, inhuman monsters, as cozy. But this was a cozy book.
Rae "Sunshine" Seddon is content with her life as a baker. Well, maybe not completely content, but it really doesn't take her long at all to learn Dorothy's classic lesson that there's no place like home. Getting kidnapped by vampires and learning she has a stronger connection to magic than she'd previously thought is enough to make her embrace her normal life baking bread and sweets.
But that's just the first bit of the book. Of course she gets dragged back in to the vampire drama, thanks to her unique heritage and abilities. Her resistance and reluctance are both believable and handled well. Rather than making the story feel like it's dragging, they make Rae more relatable.
Beyond Rae is an incredibly detailed world. My biggest frustration with the book is that this doesn't get explored to the extent that it could, and the book ends with a whole lot of questions unanswered. It could easily function as the first book to a series. Who knows, maybe there will be a sequel some day. Until then I'm actually pretty content with this book as is. It's almost better to fill in some of the blanks myself.
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