Fledgling: A Novel (edition 2005)

I found the concept interesting, but too much of the story was explanatory and the plot advanced slower than I would have hoped. Also there were too many graphic vampire "feeding" scenes that also did little to advance plot or build our knowledge of the characters. I would like to know what the protagonist Shori does when she gets older, however. ( )

My first book of this readathon! Well, I was already partway through it, but I just finished it. It was a very good choice for the readathon, as well as for the train, so it served me well for both. It's easy to read -- something about Octavia Butler's style always strikes me like that: it goes down easy. There's something matter of fact about it, always. It suited Shori, in this story, suited the girl/woman she was supposed to be. It did feel quite like the narration of Kindred and Wild Seed, the other books by Butler that I've read, but not in a way that jarred to me.

The story itself is interesting. It's about vampires, yes, which shouldn't put you off. They're handled in a somewhat SF-ish way, and while I guess they might play baseball, they certainly don't sparkle. I like the way Butler chose to portray them as a species: the way that they truly had a symbiotic relationship with the people whose blood they drank. They have to be responsible.

I wanted it, I think, to make more of the morality of the situation -- it ended up being about the race angle (Shori is an experiment, a black vampire), and not so much about the slavery angle (once bitten often enough, a symbiont is bound to their vampire for life) -- but there was a certain amount of exploration of the relationship between the vampires, or Ina, and their symbionts, so it wasn't swept under the rug.

Some of it was a little disturbing to begin with: the idea of Shori looking like a prepubescent girl, and yet still having sex with her symbionts and so on. Granted, she's also fifty-three, in another sense, but it's still something that discomforted me.

I almost wish there was more to it -- that there was another book in which we could see Shori growing up and mating and so on -- but then at the same time, I don't. I think, for me, that would take away from it. I want to be left to think about it, and to wonder. ( )

The first section of this was, I felt, a little slow moving and perhaps a little bit over-similar to some of the other Octavia Butler books I'd just been re-reading; powerful, charismatic female protagonist, discovering the extraordinary things she can do, working it out in the company of a man who is fascinated by her almost against his will. Clay's Ark is very like this, as is Mind of My Mind, and while they're all very good I'd started to feel a bit too well-supplied with it.

At page 70, as soon as the protagonist meets others of her kind, the feel of the book shifts and I started to love it as on my first read. Butler is fantastic at building not just new worlds (as seen in the Dawn trilogy) but new societies, new rules that the characters have to make in order to manage the changes that are happening to them or, in the case of Fledgling, that the protagonist needs to find out about due to her amnesia.

I finished the book enthralled, having loved it on re-read and very sad that this was Butler's last book. ( )

The best amnesiac vampire book ever. Okay, maybe the only, but still. I think listening to it rather than reading it made the clunkiness of the prose a little more obvious, but the brilliance of the concepts behind the occasional creakiness of the words shines through. I found some clear lines connecting Butler's Pattermaster series to this book. Her exploration of what makes up a family is fascinating and well-done.

As close to horror as I'm likely to get. ( )

I really liked Butler's explanation of the Ina, even though it came in big chunks, infodumping before the story moved on again. Vampires who have a symbiotic relationship with humans was a refreshing change from the "usual" vampires who turn humans into vampires. After reading (half of) Twilight, I also liked how she made the sex metaphor into something more adult than that: "Do you you love me for me, or are you just using me for your own gains/pleasure?" She kept up the suspense well. I couldn't really keep track of all the characters at times, but I understood it was part of her worldbuilding, vampires living together in large communities. I would put it on my "If you liked Twilight, here are (better written) books about vampires" list. ( )