I just finished reading the new Robin McKinley book Sunshine, and I have mixed feelings about it, as I do sometimes when reading Robin McKinley books. My copies of The Blue Sword and the Hero and the Crown are around 17 years old, and I tend to reread both of them around once a year, to the point that now when I pick them up, I’m half rereading and half remembering the passages I’ve involuntarily memorized. So I love reading new books by her but I realize that I’m not going to be getting that same sense of connection to her work that I felt when I was a pre-teen.
At first when I picked up Sunshine, I was all “McKinley writing about vampires?!! Sign me up!” But a couple things kept pulling me out of the book. One was the way exposition and back story seemed jammed into the first few chapters. I love the world building aspects of fantasy/sci-fi, and I especially love it when you can read a book that gradually shows you the laws of physics that have been bent or you learn about a new magic system (I’m thinking of some of Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s books) through the interactions between the characters and their environment.
There were far too many times in the first few pages of Sunshine when I felt like I was being visited by the plot exposition fairy, who was perched on my shoulder intoning into my ear “Vampires walk among us, there are werewolves and demons living in modern day society, humans have recovered from a war with supernatural creatues blah blah blah,” and I was waiting for it to be over so the book could actually begin. This is probably because I’ve read far too many books of the “vampires walk among us” genre, I’m sure I have some baggage and do not tend to get excited about this particular theme unless the vampires were something unexpected like cyborg vampires, vampires that get their strength only from green jello shots, or roving interior decorator vampires.
The other thing that drives me batty sometimes when reading a book is when things that exist in this world get renamed or cosmetically changed and no one really explains what they are or how they work. This is a place where I wouldn’t mind like one or two sentences of exposition 
In a world where our plucky heroine makes her living baking muffins, rides a bike, and drives a car, why can’t the Internet be called the Internet instead of a “globnet”? Why on earth is a computer called a “combox”? If our heroine somehow is getting access to a channel of information only about the supernatural from her world’s “globenet”, who is aggregating this data for her? Ok, I’m being an overlynitpicky librarian here, but these were the things that kept pulling me out of the book.
Once I got the first couple chapters out of the way, the book starts to settle into a groove, and I wasn’t turning the pages wondering when the story would start. Sunshine meets her Vampire and starts on her path to self discovery, learning more about her past and her friends (one of them is a librarian) and family. I couldn’t put the book down, I’ve been carrying it around with me and reading it on the bus. I did enjoy reading Sunshine, but I’m not going to be rereading it every couple of years.
Meanwhile …
Yes, even in my red, white and blue fog, I realize Blogachusetts has other things to talk about these days:
I found the exposition to be a bit more problematic past the first two chapters–it was a bit disconcerting how the action would come screeching to a halt every so often, so that Sunshine could recap how demon genes interacted with magic users, or whatever. I think partially it’s because McKinley hasn’t done first-person narrative in a while, and so couldn’t use the Whimsical Exposition Narrative Voice and get it all out of the way at once, as in Spindle’s End.
But yes, another decent entry in the saga of Normal But Quirky Women who Learn Something Special About Themselves. I especially liked that everyhting didn’t wrap up neatly; it certainly *ended*, but it wouldn’t be out of place for her to come back and explore what the deal is with Mel, for example.
Now I’m reading Quicksilver. Young Isaac Newton getting beaten up in a schoolyard? Yay, Stephenson!
You’re right it was Whimsical Exposition Narrative Voice that I was missing. I don’t mind the exposition when it is entertaining and whimsical!
I liked the non-ending ending too, I also would not mind finding out more about Mel if she decides to write a sequel.