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Hm. Finished reading Robin McKinley's Sunshine. Really liked it, to my great surprise.

Not a vampire fan, me. I've never seen what the fuss is about. What *I* see is animus figures turning teen-aged knees weak. (That's the broad definition of teen-aged.) I'm not an animus fan either, not since I turned middle-aged, anyway. More precisely, I'm not a fan of what the animus figure does to otherwise rational people who haven't the sense to keep him on the fantasy level. Why do women date and marry guys who break their arms and blacken their eyes? Hell, why do they date and marry convicted serial killers? Animus figures are hazardous to your mental health if you're lucky and physical health if you're not.

Even as literary figures or manga characters they'll damage your dignity, unless you exercise great care not to let them. Please don't rhapsodize about the kakkou ii sardonic oyaji, emotionally manipulative or emotionally constipated as per. (The Japanese fen *will* do it. As long as they do it in Japanese I'll shrug and go read something else. Maybe. Or maybe I'll snarl about what twits the Klaus fans are. It's a very sore point of many years standing.) And please, for the love of all that's holy, don't fall in love with your own animus character: she says, looking at just about everyone who's ever created an animus character. No really. You know who didn't fall in love with their animus character? Ikuhara Kunihiko. He knows why Akio is irresistible and he knows why Akio is hateful and he not only shows him being both, with impartial fairness (in the series; the movie has all the excesses of war-time propaganda), he knows that kewl bad-assery does *not* trump everyone and everything all the time, and that moral weight cancels it out as if it never was. But other people's animus figures are as obvious as Mary Sues and much more embarrassing. Their gears show. (Their batteries show, actually. Vibrators don't have gears.) We know what they're doing for the author, and being sexual, it's not something that should be displayed to the public.

So, McKinley. Who does a pretty good job of avoiding all the pitfalls attendant on a full-blown vampire character with all the trad attraction of same. A little more otherness and kimoi would have gone down a fair treat, and not walking hand and hand into the dark night would have been OK. Wouldn't have minded if there'd been no sexual attraction at all: the protestations of how revolting and traumatic it is to see him do these horrible things which are never named or described, aren't enough to counteract the extremely visceral decription of how you wanted to jump his bones so badly when you landed, naked, on top of him.

However the people in the book are worth the price of admission (I'd say humans, but most of them aren't completely.) And the unresolved mysteries of umm just what's *up* with Our Lady of Pain and Sunshine's boyfriend and some of the others. Was this the one she was going to write a sequel to and then had an attack of writerly angst and now never will? Which is sad, if so.

But mostly it's the language that does it. It has flavour without using seasoning. It's whatever the opposite of undistinguished is. It's written by an author who knows what she's doing. Which McKinley usually does, I grant you; it's just that I've never overly cared for what she's done before. (In fact earlier on I was muttering, Look weren't we here before in Beauty? One-notch-up from spunky heroine encounters bestial male Other?) Couldn't get through Winter Rose; my nose kept smelling Twee. Maybe I should give that another go-round as well.

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Yes and double-yes on animus figures (though I suspect I'm still doing it wrong, myself).

Am I making things up, or is Winter Rose a McKillip rather than a McKinley? I recsll liking it a lot, but it's a good deal less complicated than McKillip's usual, which does push it towards the twee side.

You're right, Winter Rose is McKillip and Rose Daughter is McKinley, and it was the McKillip I was thinking of. And now I'm further wondering if I've got McKinley's Damar books confused with Joyce Ballou Gregorian's Tredana, which is decidedly possible. (sigh) Suppose I must reread those as well.

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umadoshi and intrigued, pardon the intrusion.

McKinley is my Favourite Author Of All Time, so am a bit biased, although I don't unconditionally love everything she's written. Sunshine I love almost unconditionally, although McKinley's protagonists' tendencies to dither frantically for pages on end has started to get on my nerves. I've talked to other people who found the Naked Bit very jarring; it didn't bother me as much but I'm very glad it didn't go anywhere.

I've read several McKillip books and can't clearly recall any of them; they left no lasting impression. I just reread The Tower at Stony Wood and realized why - it's all dreamlike atmosphere and archetypes without any real people. I think that's why I love McKinley - strange and magical things happen, but meanwhile everybody is still real and visceral and has to pee.

I'm the reverse. I do remember McKillip, and very well, because of being blown away by The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, first, and then made to suffer as The Riddlemaster trilogy came out, book by book. The cliffhanger in book 1 ate at me in an almost physical way. The later stuff I'm not so sure about: there's that twee thing again. But atmosphere and archetype is exactly what I like, and why for a long time I read manga rather than books in English.

McKinley after Beauty doesn't stick in my mind. I know I've read Blue Sword; I can't remember if I've read The Hero and the Crown, though I own it. If she's who I'm thinking of and not Gregorian, then she feels a bit too much 20th century American heroine for my tastes, all feist and issues and sex-of-course. The heroine of Sunshine /is/ American, so maybe it's reasonable for her to be talking about dicks and cunts and labia-- but I really wish she hadn't.

o_O' I think you do have her mixed up, as before Sunshine I can't recall ANY overt sexuality; it was quite a departure for her and a bit startling for longtime readers. In her earlier books the courtship between main characters was often rather overly formal and proper, although I still loved the language.

The language of the girl-on-horse story I'm remembering is perfectly chaste, if inclined to descend to coy, but certainly the characters are having what I, in younger primmer days, registered as casual sex. So good, not McKinley.

I think McKinley's Sunshine has something of what was in John M Ford's The Last Hot Time -- the feeling of a larger world with interesting things going on that you don't hear all of, and the "show don't tell" ethos a lot of the time. Which makes for a good read, to my tastes.

This is true but... McKinley's character is more there than Ford's protagonist (first person as opposed to third, IIRC, and quirks of narrative style) which makes everything she sees rather immediate. Those other things in the larger world are still pretty up close and important to the character, or should be. My boyfriend has, now I think about it, rather more and rather odder tattoos than a simple biker should have, and I'm *sure* I saw him doing something a simple biker wouldn't or couldn't, not that I trust anything I saw then but... That's not something you can just shrug off. That's the gun hanging on the wall in Act 1, when there isn't an act 3.

True.

I did very much like the Sunshine world. I would have liked to read more in it.

Here via Umadoshi.

I agree with you that I could've done without the attraction in Sunshine, especially that aborted sex scene. (I bounced hard out of the story at the c-word, but that's me.) On the other hand, for the careful sprinkling of just enough exposition (or not quite enough), for the world-building, and for the mood and voice, I consider this to be a darned near perfect book. (I also have a sunshine kink--lalala!)

A note of caution: I consider Sunshine to be pretty unique for McKinley. Dragonhaven has a bit of similar stuff going on--themes and quirky voice--but it's nowhere near Sunshine's caliber. (Definitely a library read.) They can't all be Sunshine, but oh, if they could!

I agree with you on the world building and the casual exposition thereof, and the just-enough information (though of course I wanted a lot more. Guns on walls, woman: you have at least two of them.) If it's pretty unique, then I must read my other two McKinleys to see just what it is I'm not remembering about them.

I don't mind the unexplained things in Sunshine. I think they add to its awesome, in fact. "Guns on the wall" indicate that there's more going on here; it's not all simple, and maybe you'll get it explained, or maybe you'll just have to learn to live with unanswered questions.

(Also, for whatever reason, the goddess of pain didn't interest me much at all. Maybe that was because I never in my life want to encounter someone like her, so I don't want to know any more about her than is absolutely necessary for Sunshine's story.)

The goddess interests me a lot because there's no way she's ordinary human. There's too much of her and it's too over the top. The only other person Sunshine responds to that way is Bo. Hence she must be a Something-- one that somehow hasn't tripped anyone's alarm system triggers, meaning a very good Something indeed. The questions she raises are too compelling for me to dismiss as 'Oh yes, she's Nurse Ratched.'