I started my book review blog in 2009 and I have read so many outstanding books that I wanted to share them again with my followers on #SegueSaturday.  I first posted this review in December 2012 and have been a big fan of Robin McKinley since.  I remember this book surprised and enchanted me because it isn’t the typical vampire book. It’s a book about an unusual friendship between a baker and a vampire.

Enjoy!

MY REVIEW

This is not one of your typical vampire books. In fact, it is more about Rae “Sunshine” Seddons, a young baker, who happens to get thrown into a situation where she actually saves a vampire named Constantine by using an unlikely power of her own…sunlight. The pairing is surprising and their friendship and what the consequences mean are written in a way that are funny and interesting to the reader.

I read a lot of books and many of them don’t surprise me like this one did. That is what made this novel a joy to discover.

I want to thank my friend Annie who let me borrow this book. She truly has good taste in authors.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in her mother’s hometown of Warren, Ohio, Robin McKinley grew up an only child with a father in the United States Navy. She moved around frequently as a child and read copiously; she credits this background with the inspiration for her stories. 

Her passion for reading was one of the most constant things in her childhood, so she began to remember events, places, and time periods by what books she read where.

McKinley attended Gould Academy, a preparatory school in Bethel, Maine, and Dickinson College in 1970-1972. In 1975, she was graduated summa cum laude from Bowdoin College. In 1978, her first novel, Beauty, was accepted by the first publisher she sent it to, and she began her writing career, at age 26. At the time she was living in Brunswick, Maine. Since then she has lived in Boston, on a horse farm in Eastern Massachusetts, in New York City, in Blue Hill, Maine, and now in Hampshire, England, with her husband Peter Dickinson (also a writer, and with whom she co-wrote Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits in 2001) and two lurchers (crossbred sighthounds).

Over the years she has worked as an editor and transcriber (1972-73), research assistant (1976-77), bookstore clerk (1978), teacher and counselor (1978-79), editorial assistant (1979-81), barn manager (1981-82), free-lance editor (1982-85), and full-time writer. Other than writing and reading books, she divides her time mainly between walking her “hellhounds,” gardening, cooking, playing the piano, homeopathy, change ringing, and keeping her blog. 

Follow Robin on her blog and on Twitter.