Sunshine -- Robin McKinley

It took me two years to get around to reading this book.  Does that make me a bad fan?

I was a little scared.  It's a grown-up book, after all, which I'm not used to Robin McKinley writing.  The review at amazon.com were really, really mixed.  I was worried that I wouldn't like it.  Or that, worse, I would hate it.

Hello.  It's Robin McKinley.  And Neil Gaiman loved it.  Obviously, I shouldn't have worried.

Do not go into this book thinking that it will be anything like any of her other books.  (Okay, I haven't read Deerskin.  But I suspect that this isn't like that one, either). 

First of all, it's set in the present day: 

I liked living alone.  I liked the silence--and nothing moving but me.  I lived upstairs in a big old ex-farmhouse at the edge of a federal park, with my landlady on the ground floor.  When I'd gone round to look at the place the old lady--very tall, very straight, and a level stare that went right through you--had looked at me and said she didn't like renting to Young People (she said this like you might say Dog Vomit) because they kept bad hours and made noise.  I liked her immediately.  I explained humbly that indeed I did keep bad hours because I had to get up at four A.M. to make cinnamon rolls for Charlies Coffeehouse, whereupon she stopped scowling magisterially and invited me in.

Or, well, in an alternate present day:

I sat on the sagging porch, swing my legs and feeling the troubles of the day draining out of me like water.  The lake was beautiful:  almost flat calm, the gentlest lapping against the shore, and silver with moonlight.  I'd had many good times here: first with my parents, when they were still happy together, and later on with my gran.  As I sat there I began to feel that if I sat there long enough I could get to the bottom of what was making me so cranky lately, find out if it was anything worse than poor-quality flour and a somewhat errant little brother.

I never heard them coming.  Of course you don't, when they're vampires.

Well.  I'm starting to wonder if this YA-author-writes-adult-book-about-vampires is becoming a trend.

I really liked it.  Like I said, it's completely, completely different from her other stuff, and it's got a weird rhythm--Sunshine's (yes, that's her name--well, nickname--only Robin McKinley could make that work) storytelling involves a lot of digressions--but once I started, I didn't take a break until I was done.  (Part of the reason I liked the style so much might have been that Sunshine uses a lot of parentheses and dashes).  There's some great slang in the book--it's mostly based on mythology, and it works well--it fits.

She used the c-word (just once that I remember), which was a little jarring, even though it was two-thirds of the way through.  She also said 'dick' a few times.  It was kind of weird, since I'm used to her more left-to-the-imagination type of naked/sex scenes.

Oddly enough, it reminded me of the Anita Blake books.