Play Book Tag discussion

It pains me to rate this book so low, as I love Octavia E. Butler and especially Kindred. Unfortunately, this book is very far from Kindred.

The story follows an amnesiac girl, Shori, who turns out to have been born a vampire, or "Ina," as the community calls itself. She was attacked and left for dead, and lost her entire family in a fire. Desperate for answers, she ventures out into the human world, trying along the way to regain her memories and her identity.

Sounds super interesting, right? Well, it was... for the first third. Maybe up to the first half. But there is so much here that feels underdeveloped, and the plot becomes super rushed and rather boring, preferring to give us huge info dumps about Ina culture and traditions instead of giving Shori any agency to figure it out on her own. I got the sense Butler had enough notes about the Ina to fill several books, but had a tight deadline to fill, so she shoved it all into one manuscript and then sent it off to her publisher without doing much revision. (And the editors clearly fell down on the job, as well, as I found several instances of sentence-level grammar errors and typos. It felt very sloppy for a book of a legendary author!)

I had a difficult time sympathizing with Shori. The novel seems to go to great lengths to show to us how she is different from human beings... but without the human depth of emotions, and without the weight of her memories, she often felt robotic or even animalistic to me. I found myself wondering several times if Shori was meant to be the villain of the story, for how poorly she treated her human "symbionts." But the narrative is framed to champion her, which felt like a very strange choice.

I also felt terrible for Wright. I thought the book was perhaps trying to explore consent issues, except with subverted tropes, since (view spoiler)[Shori is described as very child-like, even prepubescent, but her venom ensnares and entraps humans with basically a single bite. The fact that Wright becomes super sexually attracted to her after being bitten could have said something really interesting about consent. He is never given the chance to consent to what Shori is doing to him. I thought this had to be deliberate since it is such an obvious subversion of older men preying on young women and girls, but....... it never really goes anywhere? Sure, Wright protests a few times, but he is never shown resisting Shori's rule over him, and I found that to be a real missed opportunity. (hide spoiler)]

I could be here all day if I wanted to sit and list all of the missed opportunities in this book. It seems to be trying to do a new take on vampire fiction, especially with how it features a person of color as the main vampire. But Shori's skin tone rarely factors into the plot – except when it does, and I guess we're meant to believe that (view spoiler)[there's one bad apple family of Ina who are racist and find her to be inferior because she is the result of a genetic experiment fusing human and Ina DNA and that has made her skin darker? But how this is accomplished is never explained, nor are any of these other Ina factions fleshed out, so we don't truly understand who is on board with these experiments and whether the prejudice against them is any sort of systemic issue, or just this one clan having somehow picked up American racism over the course of several centuries.... IDK. (hide spoiler)] And there seems to be a lot trying to explore a non-human species' symbiotic relationship with humans, but again, it's just so terribly underdeveloped I'm not sure I know what I'm supposed to take away from it. It's often framed as good, except that the humans seem completely unable to resist the Ina once they're bitten, and again that raises the consent issue... like, can they ever truly be consenting to any of this??! I felt like sometimes the book was trying to tell me that polyamory is okay, which like, sure... if everyone involved is giving informed consent. But I don't know if biting someone to get them addicted to your venom so that they can't live without you is a good parallel here...

I could go on and on. I think most of my issues would have been resolved if Butler had given me more to work with, and more to explore about this fictional civilization. But after awhile it all became pages of expositional dialogue as the characters around Shori explain things to her she should already know. There is a mystery about who killed her family but it's rather weak and we know the culprits near the midpoint. The rest is just a long, drawn-out vampire council meeting that seemed to have no real stakes. By the end nothing felt resolved, and nothing about this way of life was questioned. There's also a lot of weird biological determinism in how the Ina are framed. That rubbed me the wrong way as I desperately wanted someone to challenge it, but no one ever did. Maybe some of these ideas were radical when posed in 2005, but it all felt so obsolete to me. This book has not aged well.

I was mostly just glad it was over.