Fledgling

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).