Fledgling

“The much-lauded Butler creates vampires in her 12th novel (her first in seven years) that have about as much to do with Bram Stoker's Dracula as HBO's Deadwood does with High Noon. They need human blood to survive, but they don't kill unless they have to, and (given several hundred years) they'll eventually die peacefully of old age. They are Ina, and they've coexisted with humans for millennia, imparting robust health and narcotic bliss with every bite to their devoted human blood donors, aka "symbionts." Shori is a 53-year-old Ina (a juvenile) who wakes up in a cave, amnesiac and seriously wounded. As is later revealed, her family and their symbionts were murdered because they genetically engineered a generation of part-Ina, part-human children. Shori was their most successful experiment: she can stay conscious during daylight hours, and her black skin helps protect her from the sun. The lone survivor, Shori must rely on a few friendly (and tasty) people to help her warn other Ina families and rediscover herself. Butler, keeping tension high, reveals the mysteries of the Ina universe bit by tantalizing bit. Just as the Ina's collective honor and dignity starts to get a little dull, a gang of bigoted, black sheep Ina rolls into town for a species-wide confab-cum-smackdown. In the feisty Shori, Butler has created a new vampire paradigm—one that's more prone to sci-fi social commentary than gothic romance—and given a tired genre a much-needed shot in the arm.”

– Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Renowned sf author Butler's first novel since Parable of the Talents (1998) delves deeply into the world of vampires… Butler has a reputation as a master for good reason, and her narrative flows quickly and seamlessly along as Shori seeks those who would destroy her. Gripping and memorable, Butler's latest is a welcome return performance.”

– Booklist (Starred Review)

“Like most of Butler's protagonists, Shori is black — the melanin in her skin is what allows her to withstand daylight. And, as in Butler's other novels, the characters deal with questions about racism and the viciousness it brings out in American society. But in Fledgling, racism isn't simply a black-and-white issue... Butler goes on to explore ideas of community, justice, and race with a nod to the preternatural. Her writing is vivid and tense, and she manages to make even a drawn-out Ina judicial council seem complex and intriguing. The book is laced with emotionally and erotically charged encounters, some of which are disturbing, even after one remembers that Shori isn't actually a child... Butler also challenges conventional ideas about relationships and responsibility, and introduces new ones about morality and justice. It's a fascinating read, uncomfortable, horrifying, and ugly at times, but always compelling.”

– Lylah M. Alphonse, The Boston Globe

“Octavia Butler's deeply disturbing novel, Fledgling, about a 10-year-old girl vampire's struggle to survive is my book of the year. A harrowing meditation on dominance, sex, addiction, miscegenation and race that completely devours the genre which gave rise to it. How can you go wrong with a novel about a black vampire that has the line: 'Do you love me, Shori, or do I just taste good?'”

– Junot Diaz, The Guardian, Books of the Year (2005)

“A little girl suffering from amnesia wakes to find that she’s actually a middle-aged vampire, in this suspenseful novel from Butler, her first in seven years… Butler effortlessly navigates what are pretty queasy waters, what with Shori’s frank and carnal relationship with her symbionts, complicated by her looking like a ten-year-old girl when in fact she’s 53. Racist fears of miscegenation are also given an interesting spin in a story so convincingly told, via Butler’s hardboiled yet emotional prose, that one is likely to forget it’s about vampires… A finely crafted character study, a parable about race and an exciting family saga. Exquisitely moving fiction.”

“Butler’s vampires are more cultured than monstrous, and Fledgling, an action-packed whodunit that builds into a riveting legal battle, teems with ideas about the creatures as well as the mechanics of relationships. In charged, erotic prose, Butler weaves a mystery that’s as titillating as it is disturbing. Fledgling is a work of fantasy, but it explores many of the ideas of consent and desire that Butler broaches in Lilith’s Brood. Even when she wasn’t writing about aliens, she was.”

– Stephen Kearse, The New York Times, "The Essential Octavia Butler"

“The often bleak speculative fiction of Octavia E. Butler might seem an odd escape from the news, but I found most of the vampires in Butler’s final novel, Fledgling, somehow reassuring. Butler’s vampires aren’t the average bloodsuckers, snacking on humans and discarding our desiccated corpses like peanut shells, but symbionts who cultivate extended families of willing humans, granting them longer lives and better health… Shori sets out to rediscover who she is, build a new family and bring the murderers to justice, confronting bigotry along the way. Other Butler books, like Kindred or the Parable novels, might feel more topical, but if you’re intrigued by humanistic, hopeful vampire lore, I can’t recommend Fledgling more highly.”

– Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times Book Review, "New & Notable"

“Beginning with the squicky idea of a vampire-girl with an adult male dependent, Butler’s Ina families pose characteristically unsettling questions. Don’t all intimate relationships—not only those deemed taboo—involve power imbalances? And what can 'consent' mean when one being needs another to sustain one’s life? After one bite, it’s difficult to tell where choice ends and compulsion begins. Butler suggests that the Ina-symbiont relationship might be no worse than the forms of dependency that humans already take for granted.”

– Julian Lucas, The New Yorker

“...within a few chapters, we're utterly seduced by the forward motion of the narrative. Bitten, is how the narrator herself might put it... Dare I say that Butler's emotionally and intellectually engaging story about a war between vampire clans carries the reader along with that same sense of being in good hands? I only wish she herself had been longer lived.”

– Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered

“The much-lauded Butler creates vampires in her 12th novel (her first in seven years) that have about as much to do with Bram Stoker's Dracula as HBO's Deadwood does with High Noon… Butler, keeping tension high, reveals the mysteries of the Ina universe bit by tantalizing bit… In the feisty Shori, Butler has created a new vampire paradigm—one that's more prone to sci-fi social commentary than gothic romance—and given a tired genre a much-needed shot in the arm.”

– Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“How strange to find Octavia E. Butler digging up the old bones of this legend. As the first African American woman to make a name for herself in science fiction and the winner of a MacArthur genius grant, she seems an unlikely victim of Dracula's allure. But, as we might expect, her new novel, Fledgling , doesn't just resurrect the pale trappings of vampire lore, it completely transforms them in a startlingly original story about race, family and free will... There's not a drop of Bela Lugosi in these pages, but Fledgling exercises the same hypnotic power the old Count projected onto his victims. Squirming in my chair, I was totally hooked, sometimes nauseated, anxious to put it down, but unable to look away. Go back, go back!... How many of our happy relationships involve a degree of dominance or dependence that we can't acknowledge? This is Butler's typically insidious method: to create an alternative social world that seems, at first, alien and then to force us to consider the nature of our own lives with a new, anxious eye. It's a pain in the neck, but impossible to resist.”

– Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Fledgling, the last novel Butler published before her death in 2006, is a propulsive story about Shori, an amnesiac 53-year-old Black vampire who must reconstruct her past after she wakes up shrouded in darkness, alone and with no memories. While Shori makes her way through the world—specifically the suburbs of Washington State and, later, California—she discovers more about herself and her apparent incongruities: As an Ina (a vampire species that lives relatively harmoniously alongside humans), she looks like a 10-year-old child, but she has the desires of a woman; she needs human blood to survive, but feeding off humans can make them, in turn, physically stronger. Fledgling is, at heart, about an individual reconciling who she is with how she looks, and learning to use her considerable power responsibly.”

– The Atlantic