Fledgling Audiobook By Octavia E. Butler cover art

Fledgling

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Fledgling

By: Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
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This is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly unhuman needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: She is in fact a genetically modified, 53-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted - and still wants - to destroy her and those she cares for and how she can save herself.

©2005 Octavia E. Butler (P)2020 Recorded Books Black Creators Vampires Paranormal & Urban Fantasy Genetic Engineering Science Fiction Paranormal
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The end was a little anti-climatic but I love the way Octavia Butler weaves social justice issues into sci-fi fantasy.

Interesting take on vampires

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This story is very interesting. I enjoyed it. Good twist and turns. It kept my attention.

Very good

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I couldn’t put this book down! The narrating was also some of the best I’ve heard. It was like listening to a movie!

Fantastic story and narrating!

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I’m a fan of Octavia Butler. But I think her short stories are generally better than her novels and this particular novel feels derivative of her own short stories like “blood child.”

It’s very talky and kind of drags on. The narrator does OK with the voice with the female voices. But her British accent is absolutely the worst I’ve ever heard on an audible book. It was laughably bad. And I’m a little shocked it was allowed to get by.

If you were a fan of Butler or a vampire stories, I guess this is worth a read, but it’s kind of disappointing

Kind of a mediocre book and a mediocre Audible

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I don’t think this is a thriller you can just soak in. It’s definitely a difficult read. It certainly isn’t meant to be a comfortable or quick book. It’s an immersion in pain and injustice that CANNOT be put right. How do you get justice when justice CANNOT be a literal thing? It’s not a question most stories deal with. Even other stories about crime and punishment usually try to give pat answers. This one seems much more about hard questions. It makes for a disturbing picture but a truthful one.

It’s hard to miss just how powerful a voice Octavia Butler had in this. It’s a fascinating read even as it is so uncomfortable. Several details simply didn’t start to make sense to me until nearly the end. But the desire to know what happened, how the impossible situation was dealt with, kept me going until it did start to make sense as a blistering commentary on the real world.

It’s not merely an uncomfortable book within the text, it’s uncomfortable in its commentary on the reader and the inherent unfairness that we bring to the text. And I think that’s the deeper point. That the early ick factor is a comment about how we as the reader would place our own limits on the justice of the world before understanding a sufficient amount of information. And how we are ready to be disgusted one moment and full of praise another by the fulfillment of the same underlying need. It seems worth the question of both how we would give justice and why we would do it the way we would. The text seems to demand that question of the reader.

I feel like this book is a glove thrown down in challenge to some of the basic assumptions of American society. It’s soft only in that it is an easily digested symbol to represent a hard and bitter thing. And I don’t know that we shouldn’t feel ourselves judged harshly by the end of the trial.

An enthralling but difficult read that requires a lot of thought about law & order

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