Ms. Hen reviews Fledgling

Fledgling

Octavia E. Butler

Grand Central Publishing

2005

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because right now she is studying vampires, and she is a big fan of Octavia Butler. She never knew that Ms. Butler wrote a vampire novel, but it came up when Ms. Hen did a search for vampires online. Ms. Hen was excited, because she knows there is a lot of bad vampire fiction out there, and she does not want to make the mistake of falling down that ramp again.

This novel is about Shori, a fifty-three year old vampire who appears to be in an eleven year old girl’s body. She wakes up with amnesia after her entire family was killed in a fire. She is rescued by Wright, a young man who becomes her first symbiont, which is the person she drinks blood from, though she does not know that word at first. She and Wright become lovers and she eventually finds out the truth of her story.

At first Ms. Hen was creeped out by Shori and Wright sleeping together because she appears to be a child, even though she is old. But she gets used to the idea, and the novel is about power struggle, and Shori is the one with the power. Wright is a gentle character, and Ms. Hen almost pities him for getting involved with this situation.

Shori and Wright try to discover what happened to her family, and that brings her to her father’s family, but they also get burned out of their houses and murdered. Shori doesn’t know why people are trying to kill her families, but she learns from two symbionts that survive her father’s family’s fire that people are upset that Shori had been genetically modified with black skin so she could walk in the sun, and some Ina, which is what the vampires call themselves, think she is dangerous. The four of them, Shori, Wright, Celia and Brook, try to find a safe place.

Ms. Hen thinks this novel is about love, and trying to find family, and making family from the people who are near, and the struggle between the old and the new, and also prejudice of new ideas. The old family, the Silks, do not like that Shori can be in the sun are offended because she is something new, and they do not want change.

This novel turned into a courtroom drama at the end, which Ms. Hen did not expect or particularly enjoy. Ms. Hen doesn’t think that this is a typical vampire novel; it’s a little too nice, and somewhat slow at times. Ms. Hen had high hopes for a vampire novel by Ms. Butler, and though she didn’t love this, it wasn’t the worst book she has read recently.