Sunshine Book Club Week 8

[accidentallymel]

And so we have reached the end! What are your thoughts? How did you like the book?

I think one of my favorite parts of Sunshine, besides, like, everything, is Rae's reaction to getting out alive - her shock and the choices she makes in the end there, when they survive after she was sure they couldn't are so in-character and perfect. I love the

Comments

[biggersandwich]

That whole ending sequence is amazing. The long set of her and Con running through nowhere with vampires turning up without warning is so recogniseable as a dream-space - haven't we all had a million dreams where we run through a place that isn't a real place? - that it just makes the intense physicality of destroying the vampires worse. And then Rae gets to have a human reaction to the whole thing and be in shock, real unpleasant shock, not either movie catatonia or something to be fixed with a blanket and a cup of tea alone. So well done.

Con passing as human is so weird. Especially because Rae keeps saying that it's his mannerisms that are selling it, because he still looks kind of unsettling (and how much do I love the fact that Sunshine's vampires are visually unappealing?), but he's previously been kind of bad at reading people, so I don't know how he's acting this well! It can't even be that he's using magic because Rae says he seems convincing to her, and I think at this point she's more or less immune, plus he wouldn't be

[accidentallymel]

I hadn't actually thought of that - Rae being more of a weapon than a partner in the destroying of Bo - but it's a really good parallel, because she doesn't really do a lot (she does some) to help them get there? Con mostly gets them there, and then Rae kills Bo while Con is busy dealing with Bo's gang (how badass is Con, though, to take on Bo's entire gang, basically? And win?).

And as for the loose ends - there are SO MANY, but at the end you still feel satisfied? I have no idea how that works and I would like to figure it out so that I can apply it to some of my other WIPs where I'm too lazy to figure out how to tie everything off neatly. *sighs*

I don't know how Con manages to pass himself off as human - what I like best about that though is the fact that Rae doesn't realize it at first, and sometimes I wonder why he's passing himself off as human, since clearly he's powerful enough that he should be able to just - get out, get away from SOF. Hmm. Oh, a thought - maybe the ability to pass is what Rae gave him, in all of their

[biggersandwich]

Yeah, I feel odd saying it because in general the whole feeling I get from Sunshine is NOT that she gets to be a weapon/plot device for destroying the enemy! And yet, there are some distinct similarities in the way that last scene plays out to media that really really annoys me for that reason! The Fifth Element for example, is also basically about getting the female lead into the right place at the right time, the difference is entirely in how much interiority both of them get. Which is an obvious sort of point, I guess, but it's a really neat trope subversion because Con is clearly doing so many things in the background to work out how to get them to this place, but we barely see them, or how he feels about them and it's all fine by me

[accidentallymel]

It's funny - I never, in all of the things I've wanted from/about Sunshine, I've never wanted to try and see the book from Con's perspective - I think that at least part of that are those dreams the Rae has, where she's a vampire and is thinking vampire thoughts. Like, I get that those are nightmares, and being a vampire might not be like that? But at the same time I find it utterly plausible that she's getting, like, bleed-over from the bond with Con and that therefore those nightmares are in fact what it's like to be a vampire, and NOPE. McKinley's vampires are terrifying - I do not want to try and get inside their heads