I think I’m an experiment. I think I can withstand the sun better than . . . others of my kind. I burn, but I don’t burn as fast as they do. It’s like an allergy we all have to the sun. I don’t know who the experimenters are, though, the ones who made me black.” [p. 37]
A small girl wakes in agony, injured and starving, with no idea of who she is. Or what she is: we learn, as she learns, that she is Shori, the only survivor of a massacre that killed her entire family and their Symbionts. Symbionts are humans, like the nice young man Wright who Shori meets on the road and whose blood she drinks. She is quickly reunited with others of her kind, the Ina -- an entirely separate species of humanoid, likely the source of all the vampire myths but somewhat more biologically credible. Their bite is addictive and confers benefits on the bitten human, but doesn't transform that human into Ina. The Ina cannot change shape, or become mist, and they are not immortal. Ina are typically very pale, and cannot stay awake after dawn, or go out in daylight without burning: but Shori, who is Black, can survive in daylight if she covers up. Fledgling is about her quest to recover her identity, discover who was responsible for the deaths of her family, and create a miniature family of Symbionts for herself.
Shori has to deal with racism from her own kind, as well as the ubiquitous casual racism from humans (of which there's remarkably little). She also has to deal with being treated like a child: to humans, she looks about ten years old, though she's actually over fifty -- which is the Ina equivalent of teenaged. I was uncomfortable with Shori having sex with Wright as part of the feeding process (and before she knew how old, or what, she was). I'm very uncomfortable about Wright being okay with it, too, though it's possible that he's already become addicted to her venom when she 'give(s) him pleasure'.
This is a short novel but there's a lot in it: racism, fear of miscegenation, issues of control and consent (Shori reflects at one point that the Ina-human arrangement 'sounded more like slavery than symbiosis'), as well as the more straightforward crimes of the massacre of Shori's family and a subsequent murder intended to affect her chances with the Council of Judgment.
According to one source: "Having indulged in reading every single one of the erotically charged Anita Blake vampire novels of Laurell K. Hamilton, Octavia wanted to write something similar, but a little different. A little more scientifically rigorous. A little more Black." Fledgling ends rather abruptly: Butler apparently intended this to be the first in a series, and there are certainly some undeveloped themes. I wish we'd got to see the rest of Shori's story, and how her Symbionts adjust to being part of a polycule. And I'd have loved more about the different Ina families, their religion, their hinted origins ...
Fulfils the ‘By Octavia Butler’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
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