Sunshine Book Club Week 7

[accidentallymel]

Okay, so we're coming up on the end! Next week will be the last one of these, and then the week after that we'll talk about Chalice, which I'm super excited about, just fyi. But before we do that, we need to talk about what happened this week.

This section of the book contains one of my favorite lines in all of Sunshine, that bit about vampires

Comments

[biggersandwich]

Yolande is wonderful. I love all the hints about wardskeepers we get here, how smoothly McKinley integrated the kind of magic working where you go through trials to make you more yourself (and how beautiful does that sound?) with the idea of major corporations. It feels to me as if that's just a master wardskeeper thing, not about the small craftspeople vs. large corporation issue, and I love how that keeps it grounded in the issues McKinley wants to deal with. She never goes for the obvious science vs. magic thing, nor the magic-as-tech, and it's very refreshing

[accidentallymel]

I keep coming back to the fact that I wish I could dive into this novel and explore everything, because everything is so fascinating and for every concrete answer we get we also get like, 15 more question (possibly more, even). I love the idea of training that makes you more yourself in every way possible, it sounds fascinating and beautiful (and also a little scary

[biggersandwich]

Definitely scary. But uplifting, in a way, because you don't have to be something specific to make magic work, you just have to be good at being you. I guess it's back to scary again when you think about the possibility that that's what's going on with the goddess of pain, she's just really intensely herself, but what she is is intrusive and flexibly ethical

[accidentallymel]

. . . That is a terrifying thought, about the goddess of pain, and it makes a lot of sense? If magic handlers have to go through trials to make them who they are more intensely, what if who you are is not a great person? Or even leaving aside the goddess' ethics for the moment, the idea that she's just a really intense, abrasive personality made more so through the clarifying process would definitely help explain the aura she has where it's like she's melting your brain just being in the same room.

I think also that if Mel is a sorcerer, he's probably very aware of the stereotypes people buy into about sorcerers, and the fact that he doesn't really fit any of them? Which definitely would help with the whole blending in thing - he just never mentions his ability to work magic, and everyone assumes that he doesn't have any, because he can't, right? He doesn't look/act like a sorcerer. And Rae's grandmother doesn't look/act like a sorcerer either, although she manifestly is something (I wouldn't call her a sorcerer, but that's because