Book Review: Sunny by Colin O’Sullivan

By georgelthomas on 13 Sep 2024 • ( 0 )

Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well. Today is Friday, and it’s time for another review. Today, I am reviewing Sunny by Colin O’Sullivan.

Sunny was published in December 2023 by Mariner Books and is 288 pages long.

The Plot
Sunny is a techno-thriller in which a young woman’s life is upturned when her young son and her husband are presumed dead after a catastrophic plane crash. At home, she is alone with only her memories and her homebot, Sunny.

Characters
Susie Nakamoto
When the story begins, we meet Susie, a woman who is already in the process of grieving the loss of her husband and child, who passed away a short time ago in a plane crash. Left with only her homebot, Sunny, at home for company, Susie grows suspicious of the home-help technology her husband helped create to make lives better.

Masa
Masa is Susie’s husband. He and their son were heading to South Korea when a missile flew too near their plane, causing it to crash into the ocean. He helped create the homebots, hoping they would eventually be in everyone’s home. However, only a limited trial of a thousand are currently in homes across their city.

Zen
Zen is Susie and Masa’s eight-year-old son, who disappears with his father when their plane goes down.

Mixxy
Mixxy is Susie’s free-living and free-loving bar friend who first tells her about the mysterious Dark Manual for the homebots: a manual that can switch them all off.

Osanai
Osanai is Susie’s boss at the media corporation for which she works. He is very sympathetic to her situation and wants her to take more paid time off to grieve for her loss. When she refuses, he encourages her to write about a basketball game. However, arriving at the game, the mystery surrounding the Dark Manual deepens.

Haruto Matsumoto
Haruto is the owner of the bar frequented by Susie and Mixxy. In hushed tones in the bar one night, he tells Susie more about the Dark Manual, warning her against looking further into it, and in doing so, seals his fate.

Sunny
Sunny is the book’s eponymous character. It is a homebot, a household robot tasked with daily chores, such as vacuuming. It should be a mindless programmed piece of technology, but its behaviour raises questions and suspicions for Susie.

Writing Style
I found Colin O’Sullivan’s style in this book to be interesting. The story reads like Susie’s stream of consciousness a lot of the time. It’s like we’re in her head and bearing witness to her grief-stricken thoughts. It was offputting at first, but the more I read, the more I actually found it compelling.

I related hard with Susie. My husband and child aren’t gone, but I have lost other family members and can relate to the sense of total pointlessness of the world and its mundanities that she feels amid her devastation.

What makes this novel rather marvellous is the author’s ability to draw you in without you even realising it. I had read forty pages before I realised it was after midnight; his descriptive and vivid world-building is wonderfully compelling. O’Sullivan paints a beautiful, yet at times, dreary picture of Japan and its inhabitants, making the reader feel even more as if we are in Susie’s head as she navigates the foreignness of everything in her life.

There is also a certain poetry throughout the story, which caught me off guard. I was not expecting poetry, yet it’s woven among the narrative prose. It’s really very brilliant.

Final Thoughts
Overall, I thought the book was magnificent. The plot, the characters — everything is superb. If you’re a fan of compelling storytelling, engaging characters, and beautifully crafted prose, then you’re in for a treat with ‘Sunny’.

I am giving Sunny an 8/10.

Have you read Sunny or watched any of the recent adaptation by Apple TV+? What do you think?

Thank you, as ever, for stopping by to read my review.

Until next time,

George