1 out of 4 stars
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Sunshine in the Shadows is the second book in the Sunshine Series, written by M.F. Blake. It is a young adult fantasy novel that follows Sunny, a second year academy student in a four-year program that trains students to become future Ambassadors. These students will then go on to ensure the peace of the Unified Universe.
The book follows Sunny on her holiday where she visits her friend’s home planet, rides a Clopthristwith for the first time and falls even deeper in love with a certain blue-eyed warrior. But when the Universe faces their greatest threat, Sunny has to decide whether or not to go against her culture and use her natural instincts to help in the upcoming war.
I rate this book 1 out of 4 stars.
When I read the blurb, my first thought was that it was going to be a young-adult version of Star Trek. The blurb intrigued me and I was excited to read about Sunny and her ultimatum. The book promised a fast-paced read filled with action and big decisions.
Instead, we were treated with chapters and chapters of Sunny’s light-hearted holiday adventures as a tourist. We were forced to follow her on her visit to her friend’s home planet, witness her reactions to all the different sights, watch her ride on a Clopthristwith and see her attend balls. I know that these adventures were mentioned in the blurb, but I did not expect them to take up almost the entire book. I expected the book to quickly introduce the Universe’s threat, but only in the last chapters did the book really touch upon the actual plot. In my opinion, Sunny’s holiday adventures could have easily been omitted because they did nothing to add to the story.
The characters in the book were also shallow. There was Sunny, the main protagonist who was your cliched, beautiful and petite, blonde female who happened to be an impossibly perfect fighter; Gideon, the next in line to the throne royalty who seemed to exist purely to be Sunny’s love interest; the friends, who again, were just there to be the protagonists’ friends; and finally, there were the cliched baddies who were bad because they were from a particular race.
Overall, the book had a good concept. Unfortunately, it did not translate into the book, thus making the book feel like a filler. If you had read the first book, you could have easily skipped this book and move straight onto the next in the series without having missed much at all.
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Sunshine in the Shadows: Book 2 of the Sunshine Series
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