For the Month of Love challenge: ‘'Lost in Translation”
I picked the two main characters from Robin McKinley’s book about icky, gross, non-sparkly vampires. Sunshine is a baker whose magic comes from sunlight, and Con is an undead corpse. The two of them have to figure out a way to make their bizarre friendship work.
Re-read! This one is short and sweet. I really enjoy the world McKinley built in this book. I wish it had a sequel or was longer! It dumps you right in the middle and you figure things out as the characters do. The sequence of events was a bit odd? Like, it would go back and forth between two events rather than going from A to B.
Still, it’s good! I’m glad to have picked it up again. It’s nice to be reassured that I still like a book I’ve kept on my shelf for years!
Davis : The others have been handling it very well, in fact I think Poptarts is getting a tour of the helicopter right now and it’s nice to get to know McKinley’s family but hhh- It’s a lot. Elder Church and I really like our personnal space so I’ve mostly been hiding away with the village’s animals.
Church : Uhm- Olive ?
Davis: Yes?
Church: Robin wants to ask you a question
Robin McKinley: I- uuuuh- birbs..- I MEAN UUUH—
Church: He wants to know where his birds can stay while he’s out of the mission hut..
“She told herself she should let the magic—or whatever it was—work unmolested; but her curiosity got the better of her and at last she went back to where she’d left a big shallow basin of milk only the day before…and found the surface of the milk invisible under a carpet of her bees. “Bees don’t drink milk,” she said to them. When they lifted and flew away the basin was empty and clean.”
“The water was faintly gold against the silver cup; the small stones in the bottom shone like gems. She did not want gold and silver and gems; she wanted ordinary things, commonplace things. Trees and birdsong and sunlight, and unfractured earth.”
@verecunda kindly put together the following ask meme to celebrate Rosemary Sutcliff’s 100th birthday last year, and encourage more appreciation of her and her work. very belatedly, here are my answers!
Rules: answer the questions, tag anyone who you think might want to play along, and - if you like - add a question of your own.
1. Your favourite work by Sutcliff. if you’d asked me when I were younger, it would have been Warrior Scarlet, but as I’ve not read it in a long time, I’m going to say The Eagle of the Ninth. I love it because of the nuance and variety in its takes on cross-cultural encounter and interchange, which we see through the minor characters like Placidus and Uncle Aquila as much as the major ones. But mostly I love it because Marcus, Cottia and Esca are lost, lonely individuals, who’ve been jolted out of the lives they expected to have, and had the dreams and hopes and power and status they always banked on taken away from them. And yet they forge a connection, across everything that should separate them, and make a new home and a new life, together.
2. Your favourite bearer of the dolphin ring. oh, Alexios, for sure—I love his sensitivity and perception and dry humour and deep sincerity.
3. A supporting or background character you love. Rahere in The Witch’s Brat; the philosophical, melancholy jester to the king, whose sharp mind and wry scepticism conceal a tender heart. (love the part where the church of St Bartholomew the Great is consecrated, and Rahere’s ‘strange and haunted face breaks open into joy’.) Lovel plainly has a massive crush on him, and I do not blame him in the least.
what I especially enjoy about their interactions is that it gives both of them the opportunity to be truly listened to and seen, and for both of them this is something precious and rare.
I find it so surreal to think that he was a real person, and that the church he founded in London can still be visited. I’ve been having a lot of Feelings about Christianity recently, and am not sure to what extent they’re genuinely a calling and to what extent they’re the product of spending the last month reading Tom Holland’s book Dominion. it’s the fanning of a flame rather than lighting, but all the same I’m taking it slow and remain the hovering, longing agnostic I ever was.
nonetheless, I tuned in to one of their online services one Sunday, and their vicar is such a lovely person—warm, jovial, unassuming, and with a quietly mischievous sense of humour. His homily started off with the story about Edward de Vere farting in front of Elizabeth I, went on through his chair collapsing during a papal audience, to Peter being awkward when Jesus reveals his divinity to him, and finished with how Lent is preparation for our own encounter with a living God, one who, thankfully, not only forgives but forgets our embarrassing behaviour. The rest of it was very high and serious - with some absolutely beautiful sacred music - so I wasn’t expecting something that humble. (also, I really like that their website makes a point of saying they’re an inclusive church, open to people of all genders, sexualities etc.)
4. Your favourite animal companion. of course Sutcliff is famous for her love of dogs, but for me, I think it’s the constant presence of birds in her descriptions of landscape—the curlews, the swallows, the geese, the bitterns, the plover. It adds to the sense of somewhere alive and keenly observed.
5. Is there any setting you find especially memorable? given how many times I read Sun Horse Moon Horse as a child, it’s got to be the Berkshire Downs and the White Horse of Uffington. reading Sutcliff has really made me aware of how the ancient Britons sacralised and transformed the world around them, and how the traces of that are still present today, whether in stone circles or chalk glyphs or mounds or hillforts.
6. Wild geese flighting and striped native rugs: is there a classic Sutcliff motif that never fails to warm your heart when it appears? I’d have to agree with @ciceros-ghost on the use of “it is in my heart/mind that”; I love how she flexes English to give it a more Celtic cadence, plus it’s just a gorgeous phrase.
also, I’m not sure if you’d call this a motif as such, but I really like what I think of as the ‘hockey stick’ structure common to so many of her books; in the sense that if you could graph out the protagonist’s emotional state over time, that’s how it would look. Early on the main character experiences some sort of loss or disappointment, and the rest of the book is about healing from it and building a new life and identity. I like it so much because of its emphasis on how life, despite everything, goes on; how hope and happiness are always possible, even when (it feels as if) you’ve lost everything.
7. The natural world is a vivid presence in all her work. Is there any particular nature description that sticks in your mind? none that I could quote you, I’m afraid, but I’m very glad of them all. the British Isles are a beautiful place, and it means a lot to me to see my ordinary, everyday home described with such care and reverence and dignity and grandeur.
8. Biggest tearjerker. (Happy or sad tears!) THE ENDING OF THE LANTERN BEARERS. Throughout the book we see how deeply traumatised Aquila has been by everything that he’s gone through; how he wants to reach out to those around him but won’t risk that sort of pain again. and so for him to reach a place where he loves and is loved……I had to bite down really hard not to start sobbing.
Song for a Dark Queen is also incredibly sad; it hurt how much the Romans neither understood nor cared what they were doing, how little they got or wanted to get the Iceni. A whole culture was completely trodden upon. (though on a lighter note, Julius Agricola’s letters home to his mother were precious.)
9. How did you first discover Sutcliff? the library at my primary school had some of her books, and while I can’t now be certain of this, I think the first one I ever picked up was Sun Horse Moon Horse. As a child I loved epics and fairytales and myths, and I loved ancient history. And I think I latched on to Sutcliff’s work because it felt like those; it had the same high, clear, noble, otherworldly lineaments. (though funnily enough as an adult I prefer her more grounded works, the ones that invest more time in relationship and character development. strange how your tastes and expectations change as you get older!)
10. What is it about her work that appeals to you the most? beyond the mythic tone and beautifully observed depictions of the ancient and medieval world that I loved as a child, I’ve also come to appreciate its humility and gentleness. so many of Sutcliff’s characters are in some way other, and her approach is always one of kindness, broadmindedness and generosity; one that celebrates and welcomes all that they are. also god the devotion. that simple, earnest pledging of your heart and service to another just affects me so much.
11. A book that deserves more love. The Armourer’s House is an underappreciated gem, with a folk and fairy magic gleaming through its pages. if you like Robin McKinley’s quietly wondrous cottagecore, it’s very similar in vibe to that.
12. A book you haven’t read yet, but want to. so many! in particular, I feel like I need to read The Silver Branch, The Shining Company, The Mark of the Horse Lord and Dawn Wind, just because they seem to be among the better-known and more discussed books in the fandom.
13. Which book(s) would you love to get a film or TV adaptation? Frontier Wolf, without question. I’d love to see Alexios, Hilarion, Cunorix and Connla, and all the little details of their world, brought to life.
14. Is there any historical period, incident, or figure you wish she’d written about? reluctantly accepting that Sutcliff just Would Not write about the medieval era beyond the early Normans, I’d have liked to see her try her hand at the Hellenistic period! I think there’s a lot there which would suit her usual themes, whether it’s the Hellenisation of Asia post-Alexander’s conquests and the Wars of the Successors, or early Republican Romans encountering the wider, more sophisticated, classical world.
15. Rec a Sutcliff-themed fanwork (fic, art, vid, etc.) to share with fellow fans. all of @motetus’s drawings are gorgeous, and feel so much like the descriptions from the books.
And lastly, just out of interest….how far is it from Venta to the mountains? heeee, this is the code/password from The Lantern Bearers! I believe the answer from the book is something like 200 miles - and googling distances from Winchester to Wales, that does seem about right.
For the Month of Love challenge: ‘'Lost in Translation”
I picked the two main characters from Robin McKinley’s book about icky, gross, non-sparkly vampires. Sunshine is a baker whose magic comes from sunlight, and Con is an undead corpse. The two of them have to figure out a way to make their bizarre friendship work.
I would need both my hands and somebody else’s to count the number of times that Sunshine has been recommended to me. Rosiehas been so fervent that I might still have the bruises to show for it. I knew that Sunshine was a unique spin on a vampire-slaying story before I started reading. I knew that Robin McKinley is a phenomenal writer with acres of imagination to cultivate at her disposal. I also knew that a lot of this book takes place at a bakery, and that the descriptions of cinnamon rolls and “killer zebra” cakes were just as seductive as the harsh, dark vampire world she’d created. (After reading, I can say: Huzzah! All of these things are true!) Knowing all this in advance, I made up my mind in advance to read Sunshine slowly, so that I could enjoy the process of discovering it for the first time. Four days, and many dessert-cravings later, I extracted myself from New Arcadia, blinking oddly in the daylight and wishing to know what would happen next.
Sunshine wakes up every morning at 4 am to bake cinnamon rolls at her step dad’s coffee shop. She likes her life in the bakery: the regulars, her coworkers, her sorta-boyfriend Mel. Then, when she drives out to the lake one fateful night to clear her head, Sunshine’s life gets torn to pieces. A vicious gang of vampires kidnap Sunshine and bring her to a big abandoned house in the woods, where they lock her in a room with another prisoner: an old and very hungry vampire. They don’t expect Sunshine and the vampire to talk. She is meant to be dinner. Instead, she draws on a secret magical skill from her childhood to free them both, thus binding her fate and Constantine’s together. Now the evil vampire behind Con’s imprisonment wants both of them dead.
It’s hard to return to a life of rising dough and bustling kitchens after an ordeal such as that. Sunshine can’t forget what happened to her, and she’s drawn the attention of some Special Other Forces agents. The SOF keeps an eye on any activity relating to non-humans, ever since the “Voodoo Wars” changed civilization and demons, were-folk, and vampires became a part of everyday life. With the protectors of humanity dogging her footsteps around New Arcadia, and a bunch of really nasty vampires stalking her in otherworldly realms, Sunshine has to team up with her co-captive to try and turn their fate around. It seems like everyone in New Arcadia has a dangerous secret. The further Sunshine digs into the recent traumatizing events, the more she begins to realize how unusual her own past is, and what a danger she could be to the people she loves.
I have so many things I want to say about Sunshine, and they all refuse to get typed into neat sentences. This book was always tugging on one corner of my mind over the four days it took me to finish. Layers upon layers of otherworldly drama and mysterious characters have a way of distracting a girl.
McKinley drops us into a world where paranormal creatures are as much a part of daily conversation as complaints about grumpy customers. The horrifyingly real vampires who mess around with Sunshine’s life seem extra threatening in contrast to the dramatic rumors and stories which circulate. The particular existence of demons, were-people, vampires, and the like is never unveiled in explicit detail. Sunshine thinks about Other activity a lot, so we aren’t left entirely uninformed, but you need to get comfortable with odd new pieces of fantasy popping up in New Arcadia until you can get your bearings. It took me several chapters to just accept the fact that I would be confused about some things until McKinley felt like revealing the answer. Once I came to terms with this, the reading was much easier. The vampire-slaying action gets overly complex at times; maybe unnecessarily so. My head began to spin from all the charmed objects and alternate planes of reality. But McKinley’s such a good writer that she twists it all together into a functional and intense sequence of events.
Alas for my inquisitive nature, there were a whole bunch of intriguing side-stories which took up a great many pages only to be left unresolved! Rosieassured me, when I stomped downstairs to vent my frustration after finishing the book, that Robin McKinley has wanted to do a sequel for a while but hasn’t managed to write something that worked. Fine, fine. The semi-realistic fantasy world in Sunshine is convincing and engrossing. Nearly all of the characters had such unique backgrounds and motivations, I could happily read a book devoted to each. A twenty book series, please! I actually liked how some of the newly magical events in Sunshine’s life didn’t have any direct influence on her vampire adventure, because that’s how real life works. Over the course of a very strange year, she learns that her friends aren’t always as simple as she thought they were, and that her own heritage is too complicated to tackle head-on.
The reason Sunshine is such a long book has a lot to do with the narrative style. Sunshine tells us about the events in the first-person, so we read along with whatever happens to be on her mind. When she dwells on her childhood before the coffee shop, we learn how she got her name by lying in the sunlight to heal after a bad illness. When she worries about the Special Other Forces catching on to her dealings with Con, we get a better picture of how the agency works (or sometimes doesn’t work) to protect humans from non-human dangers.
Sunshine is an extremely introspective woman, and I must say that I could have done without some of the re-hashing and moral conundrums which sometimes bog down the story’s flow. The excessive amount of pondering gives lots of weight to so many of those side-stories which never quite reached a conclusion. On the brighter side, Sunshine is a pretty hilarious narrator. Her sense of humor goes into gear at all the strangest moments, and a few of the scariest scenes are made a little more fun with her eye for black comedy. All the extra detail does make every layer of Sunshine’s life – and all of life post-Voodoo Wars – seem intricately whole and thoroughly real. And if you’re a devoted coffee-shop regular, you’ll probably be happy to read pages and pages of bakery life, where the dark menace so prevalent in Sunshinecan’t quite take away the appeal of cherry tarts coming out of the oven.
Want it short(er) and sweet(ish)? Here’s how I wrote down my feelings soon after finishing the book, for my wrap-up of what I read in September.
Sunshine is a smart urban fantasy with vampires and cinnamon rolls. The future is weird. The vampires are scary. The bakery is wonderful. McKinley’s writing was almost always incredibly strong, though I think this book could have been about 100 pages shorter and held my attention a little better. … It stands out amongst a tired genre, that’s for sure, even though it was written several years ago. Did you know that it was possible to get bent out of shape about baked goods, even while blood’s a-splatterin’ and curses are flying fast? It’s possible and it’s fun.
in sunshine our titular heroine tells of a book she reads when she’s sad wherein a gothic heroine transforms herself into a waterfall to escape the villain and i have wanted to read that specific book for years.
