Sunshine.Robin McKinley.
2003. Jove. 2nd paperback. 2004.
ISBN: 0515138819

Robin McKinley's Sunshine is a bit of a departure from McKinley's more familiar YA fantasies like The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword, better known as her Damar books, or her fairy tales retellings like Rose Daughter, Beauty and Doeskin. Sunshine, while a super book, is not a YA book. It's an edgy urban fantasy in an an alternate future suburbia where Sunshine is a baker of cinnamon rolls as big as your head,

Sunshine's world is limping along, barely, after a catastrophic Voodoo wars. It's a world where there's official and unofficial government surveillance and tracking of demons (like the various shape-changers), and part-blood demon-human descendants, where there are families of people gifted with magic handling, and where Sunshine is the only known survivor of a vampire attack. And the government wants to why, and how, and Sunshine just wants to be left alone, except, well, the vampires want to know how she did it, too, and then she starts remembering parts of her childhood, and her magic-handling grandmother . . .

I like this book. I think McKinley does interesting things with vampire myths, and while clearly nodding at her predecessors, like Buffy, she makes things new and creates her own urban mythology. One of the things I like about this book is Sunshine's first person narration, and voice; it's authentic and much more flexible than the more snooty reviewers admit. I'm not alone in liking it; Sunshine won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.