Sunshine at the Academy

Sunshine Series, Book 1

By: MF Blake

Narrated by: Taylor Dalton

Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

Every year, each of the humanoid planets in the United Universe selects two 17-year-old students to attend the Academy, a four-year program on a cruiser that travels through space. The students train with their humanoid peers to become Ambassadors tasked with ensuring the continued peace, harmony, and security of the known Universe.

Sunshine Blue Mountain, from the planet Baatar, is one such student. Sunny is faced with the challenges of leaving home for the first time, navigating new relationships, and encountering unwanted trouble at every turn, all while training to be a model representative of her planet. A goal made even more challenging by the irresistible pull she feels towards the warrior-race boy with the striking blue eyes.

This is the story of her first year at the Academy. Note that this is a young adult novel intended for audiences 13 years and older.

©2017 MF Blake (P)2017 MF Blake

Loved Sunshine the Baatarian Huntress!

I bought the audible version of Sunshine at the Academy to pass the time on a road trip with my teenage daughter. It was a hit with my daughter; she didn't want to get out of the car at rest stops as it meant pausing the story. As a middle aged adult listener, the story was light, entertaining and flowed well. I loved the character of Sunshine Blue Mountain with her internal battle between upholding her planet's conditioning of no violence and using her huntress skills to get herself out of trouble. My daughter loved all the different characters, creative descriptions of home worlds, the many action scenes and laughed when the Sunny accidentally took on the bad guys with efficient cold force. There are romantic connections between characters but nothing explicit. We are looking forward to the next book in the series.

It Works as a Teen Novel

Narration:

80% is spoken in a slow monotone. I kept hearing descriptions of things that should inspire urgency, repugnance, etc, but the tone was almost always the same. Occasionally the voice changed up for dialogue, but it's not enough, all the text has to feel interesting.

Dalton doesn't have an unpleasant speaking voice, I just needed her to do more with it to hook my attention.

Story:

The story was okay. We have a 17 year old girl going off to some academy to learn.... stuff... Thinking back on the story this seems to me more of a coming of age story in a scifi costume because there were a lot of nuts and bolts missing from the world building.

Examples:
- So each intelligent 'humanoid' species can only choose 2 people a year to enter the academy, and they send one person who doesn't have enough money to buy basic supplies? Seems like being chosen for attendance with those kind of odds would come with some kind of sponsorship if for no other reason than to not make the race/species look bad. This would have made more sense if this were some kind of prep school and Sunny was the scholarship kid without a lot of money from home.

- I know the description says the school is training them to be ambassadors of some sort, but I didn't get that from the text. Every subject seems to be about what race kicked what other race's ass, and why some other race succeeded or failed or some sort of physical activity. I'm not seeing the connection. I'd like more reminders throughout the story explaining how what they're doing now impacts their future.

- They say that "earthlings" (presumably humans) are extinct except for a few that were placed in stasis.... So why is earth being used as the standard for everything?" They go out of the way to announce that they eat earth food, use 1000 year old earth technology (plexiglass... I sincerely hope that we've come up with something better in all that time), and refer to everything as "EArth-inches, Earth-Minutes, at 'Earth-Dawn,' or "9:00 Earth Time." This was annoying. A Dawn is just a dawn it doesn't matter where it happens, and it it's always 9:00 somewhere on Earth. I could almost understand if everyone loved earth humans, but that's not the case in the story. They are feared and reviled in spite of having them all frozen, so why are they trying so hard to emulate them?

- In the real world food changes a lot over the centuries... It was weird to see alien races chowing down on 1000-2000 year old Mexican food all the time in spite of the fact that neither Mexicans, nor their species exists anymore.

- A lot of times it seemed like the author was just making up new race names on the fly to make everything sound more exotic. This was distracting at times.

Other Notes:

- Watch for echoes (the same word used multiple times in a short passage), and correct word usage. "Hypothecate" for example, does not mean "hypothesize."

Redeeming Qualities:

In spite of these examples, I think that teens could find this book interesting because the story line focuses on familiar emotions that will resonate with these readers.

Examples include:
- Being the poor kid at a school of rich kids
- Having a crush on a person that is seemingly out of your league
- Bullying
- Feeling awkward in a new social environment
- Trying to judge people based on their actions rather than stereotypes

It's the scenes where these issues are the focus that shine brightest in this novel. I'd like to have seen these magnified, and all the weird non-essential Earth and foreign race references toned down to bump this story up to an extra star or two.

This story wouldn't go on my list of sci-fi reads, but it does belong on teen reading.

Bottom line. It's an OK teen novel coming of age story with a sci-fi backdrop. It's not for hard core sci-fi readers.

Entertaining!

Sunshine is one of the two students from Baatar who enters the Academy this year. They are all seventeen-year-old students from the known planets with humanoid inhabitants and aspire to become Ambassadors.

This was an entertaining listen, but be aware that it is mainly aimed at young adults. The characters are interesting and their interactions realistic. As an older reader myself, I had issues connecting with the characters, since most of the conflicts in the story are romance related. I did miss a bigger conflict where everyone’s life was at a real risk, and this is why maybe I wasn’t completely hooked to the story.

There is also little world-building, and for someone who is into sci-fi and hard sci-fi, there are many things lacking. I didn’t fully understand why everything was measured in Earth units, being humans despised for bringing disgrace upon themselves, and also the fact that the very few alive were in stasis. It is also not clear why Sunny was sent to the Academy. What I liked was that some virtues were highlighted as positive in the story, and I feel this could serve as educational and moral purposes.

Taylor Dalton’s narration was okay, not interfering with the story, but also not adding a lot to it. There was lack of emotion on the characters interpretations, and she used a quite monotone tone for the whole book. I think this could have worked so much better with more lively interpretations.

It was a good book, but I insist that I would exclusively recommend it to young readers, and only if they are not into hard sci-fi since this is quite light stuff. It’s 3-stars for the general public, but I would give it 4-stars for young adults.

Audiobook was provided for review by the author/narrator/publisher.
Please find this complete review and many others at my review blog.
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