Review: Fledgling

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love Octavia Butler. Her Xenogensis (also known as Lilith's Brood) series is my favorite series of all time. But I have to say that "Fledgling," her last book, is also her worst.

Every Butler story I've read has closely followed the same themes: a small group of people have the power to make other people love/want/need them, and those special people surround themselves with the people that need them, typically creating a commune/family. The normal people resist and often try to refuse, but are ultimately forced into the situation and eventually come to accept and sometimes appreciate the life they have now. The story centers around the mixed emotions of the oppressed, and often deals with the guilt that the oppressors feel. Xenogenesis does this brilliantly and, in my opinion, deals the best with the internal conflicts in both directions and deeply interrogates questions about power imbalance in relationships. "Fledgling" fails to do any of those things.

The opening is powerful. The story is told in first person, and we get the narrative of a person waking up with complete amnesia, blind and in pain and exhausted. As they gradually regain their sight, mobility, and semantic memory - remembering what a deer is, but not whether they'd ever seen a deer before - the reader realizes that this character is a vampire. A bit later, we discover she looks like a young girl. The opening sequence is unsettling, squeamish, and intriguing. The vampire, Shaurya (though she doesn't remember her name at this point), hitchhikes with a man and bites him. This sparks the typical Butler paradigm: he is now tied to her, and she to him. They proceed to have extremely creepy sex because she looks like a 10-year-old and neither of them know how old she actually is (the answer is much, much older than him, but that doesn't make it less uncomfortable in the moment).

Most of the story centers on Shaurya trying to rediscover who she was. She finds part of her family, only to lose them shortly after. She seeks refuge with other vampires and suspects that she's being targeted because she's different - she's genetically engineered to resist the sun and stay awake during daylight, she's part human, and she's black. Her human companions suspect all three of these are why she's being targeted and, spoiler alert, they're right. I don't have any qualms about spoiling this because there is never a moment where Shaurya or any of her human companions are wrong about anything in the whole story, which was frustrating. There weren't any unexpected or unforetold moments in the entire thing.

The main issue, though, was how emotionally unaffected it was. Shaurya is concerned for her human companions but only in the most abstract sense. She wants to make sure she can give them a house, feed them, etc. but doesn't ever think about whether this life is good for them. Her companions express varying mild levels of discomfort with the situation, but most move past it quickly, and Shaurya's concern is always about whether they will ever accept it, rather than how she can make it better for them or whether she should do this at all. The novel is rife with opportunities to reflect on whether these human companions are truly necessary, or whether the typical vampire lifestyle (forcing 7 to 12 humans to live with and adore you forever) is the only way for them to live. But it never touches those questions, instead painting Shaurya and those she associates with as 'better than' others because they don't treat their humans like garbage.

Even aside from questions about the morality of the human/vampire relationship, Butler fails to take advantage of the first-person narration. Shaurya has no memory, no history, and never regains anything more than semantic knowledge about her life. Her reactions to deaths of people she knows fall short of emotional, and dissipate quickly, even when they should continue to affect her.

If you are going to read this, I recommend the audiobook. The narrator does an astounding job with a large cast of characters with different accents. I very much prefer female narrators anyway, since their 'male' voices are more realistic than any male narrator's 'female' voices, and the narrator here does a particularly excellent job with the men.

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