Fledgling

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.

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. 

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 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.