Jove, Copyright 2003, 657pages
ISBN: 0-515-13881-9
Read: May 2011 (at age 33)
First time read
If you haven’t read it
This book is a stand-alone story about
cinnamon buns, sunlight, and killing vampires.
This sounds a bit glib, but our heroine is a pastry chef, who somehow
gets roped into a vampire feud. It
works.
From the back cover:
There
are places in the world where darkness rules, where it’s unwise to walk. But there hadn’t been any trouble out at the
lake for years, and Sunshine just needed a spot where she could be alone with
her thoughts. Vampires never entered her
mind.
Until
they found her…
And then there are a whole bunch of blurbs
from authors and reviewers. I picked up
the book because I’ve liked McKinley’s writing before, and because Neil Gaiman
said that it was “Pretty much perfect” on the cover. So I guess the blurbs worked. It’s usually a bad sign when the plot summary is about three pages shorter than
the hand-chosen quotes, but this is an exception, for the most part.
I’ve also been feeling like reading a
“tough girl in leather kicks supernatural butt” story. This wasn’t that, but it was good anyway.
Reactions below the break (with a few spoilers):
I enjoyed almost everything about the book,
except the ending. At the end, my movie turned out to be the 2-hour pilot episode of a TV series.
There were all kinds of loose ends introduced, or highlighted, or
repeated, we had our action sequence (which was great), which untied even more
loose ends, and then the book ended. At
this point I wanted to know a lot more:
·
Who/what is Mel, anyway?
·
How’s Mel going to react to
Con, eventually?
·
Are humans and vampires
actually… compatible?
·
Who/what is the Goddess of
Pain?
·
How does the magic actually
work? Are there limitations?
The *real* story – integrating vampires
into society, or killing them all - seemed like it would start right after this
book, which did a wonderful job of introducing the setting, the characters, and
all kinds of room for more story. An
origin story, in other words. That’s
typically my favorite part of a series, but unfortunately, there is nothing
else… so I’m left unsatisfied. An
awesome series premiere, with no series to follow after it.
Rating:
3
I would have rated it higher if there had been another book to follow.
Characters:
Rae’s a good character. I really liked how she fell into an inane
unrelated prattle about baking in almost every situation. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything
looks like a nail, and her hammer was baking.
It was very well done. She also
felt real in how a unskilled, squeamish but still tough girl would react in the
various levels of strain and ick that she ran into. The whole story is tight first person - we
hear her voice throughout, and see through her biases, and it’s good that she
worked so well. She didn’t over-explain
anything, except maybe the workings of a coffee shop bakery. That was of vital importance to her, so it
was very fitting that that is what she focused upon a lot of the time. It was wonderful setting exposition a la
Steven Brust – just talk about what’s important to the character at the
time. The rest will follow.
Con was the other character of major
importance to the story. He was very...
odd. He felt more like an alien than a
turned human. He was good. I didn’t understand why Rae was throwing
herself at him sexually, though. That
was a bit too unexplained. I guess it
can be filed in the “Vampire! Oooh,
sexy” trope, even though he really wasn’t described that way.
Plot:
The plot was all right. It was a bit predictable. A few too many “mentor” figures, in the story
for my taste – Grandma, Con, Yolande, even the SOF (cops), a random woman in
the park, and a few too many coincidences as to how they helped out. There was a bit too much unexplained magic,
too, but I prefer that to having it over-explained.
Premise:
Our heroine, a baker at a family coffee
shop, get kidnapped by vampires, and then gets caught up in a war between two
old enemies (who both happen to be vampires).
She also discovers that she’s got a knack for making vampires
explode. It was fun.
Setting:
Excellent.
It was a sort of post-apocalyptic world where demons, were-folk, and a
bunch of the other nasties from mythology were integrated into society with
various levels of success. Were’s, with
the right drugs, pretty much fit into society perfectly well (as second-class
citizens, of course), as do a large portion of part-blooded demons – also
second-class citizens, as no “human” would trust a part-demon as much as a
pure-blooded human. Vampires didn’t fit
in so much. It was a wonderful setting,
and I’d like to see it explored some more.
Readability:
Excellent.
Nice pace, the ending kept me up way too late, and our heroine had a
wonderful voice throughout the book.
Other reactions:
Pretty positive.
About the same reactions as me.
Focused on details that I either missed, or didn't care much about.
Another glowing report.
Another one about like my read.
etc., etc. This is a heavily reviewed book.
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