Fledgling

I'm glad that I finally picked up this last “official” Butler novel (“official” meaning excluding Survivor). I kept putting it off because I'm not into vampires. Butler though delivers an interesting and unique take on the subgenre. Typical Butlerian themes: maternalism, race, survival.

Octavia Butler doesn't miss, and this was unsurprisingly a great read. But wow was it uncomfortable at times.

The main vampire is actually 53 years old, but looks like a 10-year-old girl. She has amnesia and doesn't remember anything from before, including that she is a vampire. Vampires regularly have sex with humans who are 20+ years old. Taken together, these points lead to some extremely uncomfortable moments early on.

That said, Butler excels at writing “alien” characters. The vampires here are different than any I've read before, and learning about their culture was one of the main draws of the book for me.

Overall, this was a very good book, but I fully understand why this is not what Butler is remembered for.

I put off reading this for a long time because it was the only Octavia Butler book I had left to read, and it's really sad to live in a world where I will never get to read one of her works for the first time. This one was not my favorite of hers, but I really enjoyed reading it. After a few books that felt rather sloggy, the refreshing pacing and tension of a Butler novel were much needed. It's a vampire story, but not like any you've read about before and definitely pulls in themes from the Lilith trilogy and the Parables as far as found families and what is really important in life. I enjoyed it as I've enjoyed everything she has ever written.

Short Review: - A very different vampire novel. The novel opens with a very young vampire that has been seriously injured and has no memory. These vampires are not changed humans but an entirely different species. The best part of the novel is the discovery of the new culture and rules of the this vampire world. In many ways it feels like a set up to a series, but Butler passed away a year after the novel was published.

The full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/fledgling/

read for blackoween 2022: a backlist book & murder mystery

i really enjoyed the writing of this book and the story. the way it combines sci-fi and paranormal elements to make a story that is interesting, unique, and important. i love sci-fi thrillers/horror so much and i also love paranormal elements but i think this takes an impressive amount of skill to ciming them into a seamless story. But i simply was super uncomfy that the main character presents as a child and has sexual relations with adults. ik that it's meant to have a purpose but i have to take off a star for it. 

Boring, sexist, pedo.
Prose are not good. Too much stiff dialoge.

I was ready to DNF early on, but I trusted Octavia Butler to win me over. This time she did not.

“Vampires” 53 yr old vampire that appears as an 11 year old. I think once you get passed this you'll be ok.

It gave all the icks and creeps.

I think this is my last (major) Butler book, having read all the others in the Canon. As usual we have a simmering stew full of questions and uncomfortable ideas about consent, power, compulsion, free will, imaginative family structure, justice, what it means to be human, etc. The world building about the vampire race was fun; the driving antagonistic force was not super complex but felt believable. The problem is it's really hard to get past the creepy creepy terrible sex scenes with the main character who is a child. I get that Butler is often trying to transgress in terms of sexual dynamics and ethics in her books, given that so many of her protagonists are young women and teens who enter sexual relationships with men much older than them, but uh, this was pretty bad even knowing that.

Starts out strong then loses a lot of steam. I found myself zoning out at parts. Too many characters to keep track of. Too much lore and customs and BS I didn't care about.

I really enjoyed this read, the take on vampires is cool and I like Shori. I like the way it's written, but there's some typos??? I'm also a little sketched by the slight pedo vibes happening.

[2.75] So when I was in the 7th Grade I had a really laid back English teacher, probably a little too laid back, and she would periodically tell us about what books she was reading. It was her way of encouraging students to be interested in reading and to socialize with her students. One of those books she told us about was this book called “Fledgling.” She explained that it was a vampire book, and it being the height of the “Twilight” books and movies this interested a lot of students. She had to quickly explain that this probably wasn't a book for kids our age. Now nearly a decade later, I see why she added that disclaimer. In retrospect, I now realize she probably shouldn't have brought the book up at all to the class, it's got quite a bit of descriptive violence and sexual content. And it's that sexual content that makes me deeply uncomfortable even now as an adult.

In the story, our main character is a young girl of 10 or 11 (it's been a couple weeks since I actually read it so I don't remember exactly) who wakes in a cave, badly injured and with no memories of who or where she is. She eventually finds herself walking on a road where a man in his 20s picks her up. This man is almost immediately infatuated with her and she with him, and they start a relationship...with sex (and bloodsucking). Yes, you heard me; a 20+ year old character and a ~10 year old character have sex in this book. Through the course of the narrative we later learn that she's actually 50+ years old but because vampires age differently she looks 10 by human standards, but still it's a 10 year old's body! I could not get past that element of the story, and it happens a lot, because vampires in this world essentially create a personal harem of humans to drink from and have sex with. It's really fucking gross and a big reason why I'm marking it lower despite some other interesting themes of race and belonging.

So, at this point I can confidently say I love Octavia Butler's writing style. A lot. No matter how strange the plot seems to me I am hooked. This book was a journey that I loved taking and I was into it really quickly. Star only knocked off because I think the ending didn't tie up enough for me but this is true for every book I have read by this author so at this point you'd think I'd be used to it but I'm not.

A paranormal/sci fi story about a vampire with amnesia. Definitely worth picking up.

I should have abandoned as soon as I realized it was a convenient amnesia plot. Huge sections of info dump world building. Not much else.

I really enjoyed this, the ending was a bit abrupt, but I like how she writes.

Unfortunately I really wasn't a fan of Fledgling. The plot meandered around and never quite found its footing. I couldn't have been less interested in the final direction Butler took the story. I also wasn't really able to get past the ick factor, so it set my entire reading experience on the wrong foot and clouded everything else. I thought it was a unique take on vampires, but that's where the strengths end for me.

This should have been a really interesting exploration of racism (given that the protagonist is a vampire who has been genetically modified to have dark skin and some other vampires hate her for it) but it read like really fluffy YA fiction following the adventures of an amnesiac Mary Sue whom everyone who isn't racist falls in love with. And the prejudice is confined to a small subset of traditionalist sticks-in-the-mud while everyone else is “good” which, yeah, that's exactly how racism works.

This could have included an interesting exploration of bisexuality (given that the vampires build “harems” that include both male and female humans) but the focus remains firmly on the male-female pairings (the main character has to find a vampire husband, her male human “first” is mostly okay with sharing her but only with women, humans bound to vampires of the same sex explain their fate is okay because they still get to have sexy times with opposite sex humans).

I expected an interesting exploration of gender (given what I had heard about the author going into the book) but it turns out vampires are matriarchal because female vampires are more biologically powerful (because they are “sexier”). That's it. It veers awfully close to gender essentialism.

On top of all this, let's throw in a bunch of sex scenes between a prepubescent vampire girl who looks about ten (but it's okay because ten in vampire years is 50 in human years) and a twenty five year old hairy man who literally can't stop himself because she's sooooo seductive (because she has the strongest vampire sexy powers ever and even her dad and brothers have a hard time controlling themselves around her).

This one was perfection. What starts as an eroto-vampiric road novel becomes an unputdownable murder mystery about dueling clans, tainting of bloodlines, and magnificently developed mythology. All phenomenally written and impossible to put down.

For years, I have anticipated reading something by Octavia E. Butler. I had built an image of Butler that was a cross between Toni Morrison and Ursula LeGuin. Maybe I picked the wrong book to start with; Fledgling more closely resembles Stephenie Meyer mixed with Stephenie Meyer (and, given the taboo nature of the plot, maybe a little Ian McEwan).

Now some may say it's a little too easy to take Fledgling, a novel about vampires, and compare it with the Twilight slogga. True. Especially true when one notes that I've never read a page of Twilight or seen a minute of the films, but I know the gist. I know I wouldn't care much for them. I know it's vampire this and vampire that and boy-girl-boy triangle. Fledgling equals same book. Throw in a legal trial (I hate trials in stories) and that's Fledgling.

Oh yeah, and there's probably a lot more sex. Except Twilight sex equals sex with Kristen Stewart; Fledgling sex equals sex with Quvenzhané Wallis. What's that you say? Wallis is only twelve? Oh, in that case she's only a couple years too old. I get it, our vampire protagonist only looks ten. Still, what about all the many people who have sex with this ten-year-old-looking girl without knowing her actual age? Ugghhh.

Really, there's nothing special about this book. It's a plot-driven vampire story peopled with flat characters and flatter sentences. Nothing like LeGuin. Nothing like Morrison. Nothing like something I'd want to read. That's not to say I wouldn't give Butler another try, but I think I'll stay away from vampires for a little while.

I'm torn... there was a lot I like about the book, the unique style of vampires and the central story, but the main character, despite being 53 years old is depicted as looking like a 10 or 11 year old girl, and there is sex, with her, by older men. Yes, they are thralls somewhat trapped by her power, but it was extremely uncomfortable reading sensually written love making scenes involving a “child”. It was an interesting read, but one I'm unlikely to ever pick up again.

This is a good first book to what could have been a great series, but it devolves from an interesting take on the vampire myth (a take which includes class and race in a way that so-called genre fiction so often doesn't) with an interesting central narrator to a mild courtroom drama, oddly enough. I love Butler, but this story feels like an introduction to a larger tale, one that doesn't quite stand on its own. It is still worth reading for the interesting vampire dynamics that Butler has created, but ultimately a little disappointing.