You have to actually think and process what's going on, which hardly any YA book makes you do.

The thing that puts Fledgling firmly outside the realm of YA, though, is that there are a whole lot of problematic sex, power issues, and racial bigotry, and Butler never hands you any answers. Oh man, Octavia Butler's books are perfect for the YA crowd, because they have all the glittery sex appeal and speculative gloss that dominates the genre, while being approximately a thousand times deeper and better-written than anything that combines 'vampire' with 'YA.' This book could sit comfortably next to YA novels for the simplicity of its prose and easily digested pages. Her reactions and perceptions are very direct and straightforward, though not to say dumb or without nuance. I think this was deliberate, as it's told from the point of view of Shori Matthews, a 'child' who spends the entire book in a state of amnesia, trying to figure out the world around her. Butler's prose is always sparse, but in this book, the sentences are often little more than simple declaratives. It is probably not her best work: at times, it read almost too simply. The issues are there, not hidden at all, not even a little bit subtle, but they are ingredients in the story, not the story itself.įledgling was Butler's 'vampire novel,' and she takes all the vampire tropes and subverts the hell out of them. Her books might be thought of as 'issue books,' which is to say that racism and sexism and classism and other social justice issues are always a big part of the narrative, but they never read like A Book About Racism or Why Slavery Is Bad. She was, in every sense, a genius, and her books show it, and they show it in a way that does not make itself apparent in her prose but in the meaning of her words. There is a reason she is still a towering presence in the SF community, and it's not just that she's the one black female author most SF fans can name. I am sure she had many, many more books in her, and the world was robbed of her talent. And in the final apocalyptic battle, her survival will depend on whether all humans are bigots-or all bigots are human. Genetically modified to be able to walk in daylight, Shori now becomes the target of a vast plot to destroy her and her kind. But Shori is a fifty-three-year-old vampire with a ravenous hunger for blood, the lost child of an ancient species of near-immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humanity.

Found alone in the woods, she appears to be a little black girl with traumatic amnesia and near-fatal wounds.

Fledgeling octavia butler