Hm. I'm interested in your opinions on Sunshine. See, for me the biggest draw was the characters. I really liked Sunshine herself, and I liked seeing what made her tick, and watching what she did next. I liked her relationships, because they seemed complex and real and interesting and helped to drive the plot.

I mean, yeah, it had some accepted genre tropes, but then, it's an unapologetically genre novel. But I absolutely do not think that the characters are formulaic, or that the plot is predictable, or that it falls too deeply into genre patterns, or any of the other criticisms that genre work generally draw. The world the characters inhabited did pique my interest, but not so much that it's what I chiefly remember in the story.

I'm not sure that I would label it a gem of world-building, partly for that reason. When I hear 'world-building,' I usually think of something Tolkien-esque. Knowing Robin McKinley's work, I am certain she spent a LOT of time working out the history of Sunshine's world, just as she's spent a LOT of time working out the particulars of all her worlds. But the term itself just makes me think of high fantasy, (perhaps unnecessarily) complicated back stories, unique geography, linguistic and cultural paraphernalia, and a general overarching sense of a different world.