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. 

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 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.