Sunshine

Sunshine is a novel by the American writer Robin McKinley, published in 2003 and set in an alternate version of our own world.

The setting is the aftermath of the Voodoo Wars, a conflict between humans and the Others that left ordinary life mostly intact and left magic stronger in some places and absent in others. Sunshine's grandmother taught her a kind of magic she has been careful never to use, and the bakery, the flour, the early shifts and her boyfriend all belong to the ordinary half of her life, which the abduction interrupts. Her fellow prisoner is called Constantine, and the reason he is chained up is that another vampire is waiting for him to die slowly; Sunshine is expected to be part of the entertainment. What follows is a vampire story told from inside a woman's practical mind, since her first problems are food, daylight and how to leave a building without being noticed. McKinley has written for young readers for most of her career, and this book was written for adults; it won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for adult literature in 2004.