The following review contains spoilers. It was the only way to explain how awful the latter half of the book is.

Octavia Butler’s Fledgling starts off with a mystery and a bang. A girl wakes up naked, alone, nearly-dead and in a cave. Who is she? What happened to her? Who did it? Will she survive? But the second half of the book is a clunky fantasy version of the Order side of a Law and Order episode. Butler tried to weave multiple touchy subjects together into a courtroom drama under a legal system of her own invention. The result is tedious.

When we first meet the protagonist, she has no name. The twenty something hunk who finds her on the side of the road names her Renee. She bites him, because unknown to either of them she is a vampire. In the Fledgling milieu, vampires do not turn humans into more vampires. Instead they are another species that forms symbiotic relationships with humans. The vampires get to drink blood and order their humans around. The humans get to live healthier and longer, but they cannot live without frequent bitings from their vampire.

Wright (the young hunk) and the soon to be renamed Shori soon discover a burned out community of farmhouses, what turns out to be the wreckage of Shori’s home, though she never remembers those details. She slowly regains some of her mental faculties, but never any actual memories. A second community of vampires rescues them, but that group is quickly attacked and wiped out too. So Shori, Wright, and two other human refugees head to yet another vampire family for protection. There they fight off attackers yet again, this time finding clues as to who is out for Shori blood. Armed with their few clues, a vampire court is held where Shori takes on all her enemies in a battle of wits.

I loved the first part of the book. Action all around. Shori slowly learning about what she is and how she is supposed to live. No memory. Particularly no cultural memory. Butler also puts Shori through a gamut of situations that seem designed to push buttons. Although we learn later that she is over 50 years old, she has the body of a 12 year old girl (with sharp teeth). Her relationship with Wright turns sexual very quickly. Although we readers didn’t know at the time that she was older, I wasn’t too bothered. I just knew there would be something revealed that would make that not so icky. You want another button? How about cannibalism? Or May December lesbianism? Or (though not revealed until later) some polyamory with a very dominant center of the family unit? I don’t know that Butler was trying to say anything in particular with all this, but she was very definitely pushing the boundaries of what is commonly in fiction. Perhaps not with each tweak individually, but by putting them all together there are definitely going to be some uncomfortable people.

Probably not the most apt thing to compare it to, but I kept comparing Shori’s lack of cultural memory to that experienced by young slaves brought to America from Africa, ripped from their families and tribes. In a lot of respects, it’s really not the same. Slaves had families on the plantations to teach them all about that culture. But it’s not the same as the community they were part of prior to coming to America. Like Shori, they were cut off involuntarily and violently from their heritage and have little way to connect with that.

But in Shori’s case, it doesn’t last very long. She eventually does find her vampire people. And they being teaching her how to be Ina. Ina are the vampires.

And this is where Fledgling starts to go wrong. Shori has to start learning things. So other Ina start explaining things to her. Complicated things. In a long drawn out fashion. Info dump after info dump after info dump. By the second half of the book, we’re subjected to an almost unbroken info dump. And it’s partially because of how many buttons Butler inserted into the text. These things have to work together, and they are complicated. That requires complicated explanations.

Since the vampires and their humans are symbiotic, the humans are called symbionts. The vampires call them that; they call themselves that. All the time. Almost to the point of saying Hello, my fellow symbiont every time. What an awkward word! I never want to hear the word again. Too much!

One of the things the reader learns early on is that Shori is dark-skinned. Some Ina are trying to breed vampires that don’t have to sleep during the day and aren’t so affected by sunlight, which fries normal vampires (though it doesn’t kill them). Yep, that sounds like eugenics to me. Already that’s getting into dangerous ground, though Butler handles that part in a way that’s fairly benign. But of course, other vampires do not like this development, this mixing not only of the dark skinned and light skinned, but also that of humans and Ina. So now we have racism thrown in. Butler’s handling of race in her Parable series was awesome. Here, it’s paint by numbers. The racist bad guys differ little from the standard genteel redneck trope. It’s boring. There’s no nuance.

This latter part of the book is dominated by a vampire trial. After one vampire rips apart the U.S. legal system (for humans), the supposedly better Ina system is described. Instead of a rule-based system that is all about who has the better lawyer or the most money, the Ina’s system is… well, I’m not exactly sure how it’s better. While supposedly designed to get the truth despite technicalities, it seems instead to depend on loyalties between families. And perhaps even more rule-bound than anything us lesser humans came up with. How species with a 10,000 year written history would manage to avoid a court bureaucracy I don’t know. They don’t really though. There are all sorts of rules.

This trial is so extremely boring. We go from action in the first part of the book to psychological mind games played between clueless Shori and knee-jerk reactionary vampires. Shori let’s her temper get the better of her, gets chided by her elders, then plays her part perfectly. Her opponents pull the classic Jack Nicholson move from A Few Good Men; they lose their cool and scream in the courtroom when prodded, thus revealing their guilt.

Butler attempted a lot, and that’s to be commended. But the execution in the latter half of Fledgling makes this just awful reading.

A few other blogged reviews:

• This Book and I Could Be Friends
• fff
• Self-Importance
• A Striped Armchair
• Ampersand
• Rixosous

Title: Fledgling
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Imprint / publisher: Seven Stories Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 316 p.
Publication date: October 2005
ISBN-10: 1-58322-690-7

Book Club of the Damned. That’s what Paul Constant over at the Stranger calls it when he reads an awful book on a dare. Well, that’s New Moon for me. I need bleach now. Spoilers abound here. I just don’t care enough about your enjoyment of this book to worry about spoiling it. Plus, if you haven’t read it yet and you’ve stumbled here, then you probably are reading it on your own Book Club of the Damned quest.

Plot: At her own birthday party with the Cullens, the vegetarian vampires, Bella Swan accidentally cuts herself triggering their blood lust. Luckily everything ends up okay, but the Cullens decide to leave town rather than accidentally eat Bella. Whatever will Bella do without her beloved but vacuous Edward? Why, she’s start hanging out with the hunky Indian boy Jacob down at the rez, all the while pining for Edward. But she’s too selfish to leave him alone when he develops feelings for her, and he’s too creepy to walk away himself. Then bad vampires start hunting Bella and the Indian youth turn into werewolves (good ones, right?) and Edward in South America thinks Bella has killed herself so he heads to Italy to get the King Vampire to kill him because he is heartbroken. Bella runs to Italy to save him by letting him know that she’s alive, but then the royal vampires give the Cullens an ultimatum to kill Bella or make her a vampire. Which is what she wants anyway, and we are done with the book.

Most codependent relationship I’ve ever read. Bella is just dead inside without her Edward. Edward is the same without Bella. Bella has to have a boy around to feel okay, whether it’s Edward or Jacob. I wanted to strangle her. Edward too. Also Jacob for good measure.

Hated all the navel gazing. A fair amount of action happens. But each time it’s followed by pages of badly written thoughts from Bella about what it all means for her and Edward. 300 levels of parsing.

Edward and now Jacob are just as creepy as before. And as manipulative. Jacob gets to be the nice guy who sticks with Bella in the hope that she comes around to having a thing for him. He’ll be the shoulder to cry on until he can use it to get in her pants. Of course, that’s until Edward returns and then Jacob gets overtly manipulative and somewhat scary trying to get Bella to break it off.

Truly awful tripe.

So why did I read this for Book Club of the Damned? I am being bribed. It’s a good bribe. It involves boots. Plus, sometimes this is just cathartic. And it’s a library book so my only cost was the caffeine necessary to read it.

Title: New Moon
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Cover creator: Gail Doobinin (designer) / John Grant (photographer)
Series: Twilight Saga; 2
Imprint / publisher: Megan Tingley Books / Little Brown
Format: Hardcover
Length: 563 p.
Publication date: September 2006
ISBN-10: 0-316-16019-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-16019-3
Subject: Vampires — Fiction
Subject: Werewolves — Fiction
Subject: High schools — Fiction
Subject: Schools — Fiction
Subject: Washington (State) — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.M57188New 2006

Show me a cover picturing a woman in leather or boots with a gun and you may just have sold me a good impulse buy. Sadly, in the two cases I’ve succumbed I haven’t been particularly thrilled with the book, including Greywalker. It has some strong positives going for it though.

On the negative side, the climactic battle in the book was over something that really would affect only undead creatures, so I didn’t really care about it much. The main character, Harper Blaine, is partially undead and my level of caring toward her is partially attributable to the relative lack of depth of her character. On the positive side, it’s one of the few books I’ve read where normal people run into vampire types and the normal people’s reactions seems reasonable. Also, despite the author being a transplant, I think she portrayed the feel of Seattle better than most books set around here. (Well, except the sooper-sekret vampire club in Pioneer Square.)

Harper Blaine is a private investigator based out of Pioneer Square. When we are introduced to her in the first paragraph, she’s getting her ass handed to her by the subject of one of her investigations. She’s caught him perpetrating some sort of fraud, he doesn’t like it, and he beats the crap out of her. She’s dead. But just for a couple of minutes before the paramedics revive her. Afterward, black and blue, she starts seeing strange things that aren’t attributable to the blurred vision she has from getting beat up. Ghosts.

Yep, ghosts everywhere! Having been dead herself, she can now slide in and out of the land of ghosts, or the Grey (hence, Greywalker). Being new to the ability, she’s not very good at it. But Harper Blaine is now one of the few beings who can go Grey and back, and so all the world of the undead now has it’s own private investigator. Though not all of them know it.

First case, woman hires her to find her son, last seen in the company of a very white serene goth looking guy with big fangy teeth. Second case, a voice on the phone hires her to track down an antique his family lost several decades prior. The antique seems to have a mind of it’s own.

Harper Blaine is really really whiny. Not quite as bad as Meg in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, but pretty close. Every time she has to do something, the doing is preceded by several paragraphs to several pages of Harper’s discussion about being afraid to do whatever it is she has to do. In addition, she has these newly found powers to go back and forth to the Grey, and she barely uses them of her own volition. Nearly every time something happens, it’s either an instinctive reaction or it’s someone else doing the work for her.

That makes it really hard to care about Harper Blaine’s character. Since she’s the only viewpoint character, that’s a bad spot to be in. The climactic conflict is over what is essentially a bomb for the undead. Ghosts, vampires, necromancers, and maybe a witch or two. Those are the people who will get blown to smithereens if someone cuts the red wire instead of the blue wire. I don’t care about them. They are bad guys, except for Harper Blaine. And she’s not someone I care to care for either, so the upblowing of the bomb doesn’t pique me.

However, Kat Richardson did capture the feel of the Seattle in which I live. In particular, a brief sojourn into the University District was spot on. I popped for the scene set inside the Grand Illusion theater as well the note about dodging skateboarders while walking the Ave. J. A. Jance set one of her series in the city and does a pretty good job of using the geography to advantage, but the feel of the city is more the feel of Seattle in the 1970s if at all. Greywalker fits better for a younger generation.

If you’re into the urban fantasy genre, I doubt this will be too bad a read. For this sub-genre outsider though, it wasn’t a great introduction.

Other blogged reviews:

• Word Nerd
• The Dreamcatcher Workshop
• Graculus’s Blog

Title: Greywalker
Author: Kat Richardson
Cover creator: Ray Lundgren (designer) / Chris McGrath (artist)
Series: Greywalker; 1
Imprint / publisher: Roc / Penguin
Format: Paperback
Length: 341 p.
Publication date: October 2006
ISBN-10: 0-451-46107-X
Subject: Blaine, Harper (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Women private investigators — Washington (State) — Seattle — Fiction
Subject: Vampires — Fiction
Subject: Seattle (Wash.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3618.I3447 G74 2006

Heather bribed me to read Twilight. I lived in Boise, Idaho for about a year. One of the few things I miss about the city is pizza from Flying Pie, particularly gourmet night when they try out pizzas not on their main menu. A pizza smorgasbord. Because people remember their pizza so fondly, the pizzeria offers a pre-made pizza option. They’ll put together one of their pizzas, then pack it in dry ice for you to deliver to your favorite people in other cities. Heather offered up one of their pizzas if I would subject myself to the dazzling angst that is Twilight. Twilight seemed like a small price to pay for a Flying Pie pizza, so I agreed.

Isabella Bella Swan moves to tiny Forks, Washington to live with her father. She soon becomes convinced the dazzling, gorgeous, aloof, smart, talented, athletic boy Edward Cullen is both a vampire and in love with pathetic, lonely, whiny, introverted, fickle, clumsy, over-analytic yet advanced placement new girl in town, herself! Turns she’s right, and chaste adventures ensue.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hate this book. It’s not good, particularly the first half of the book where the characters annoyed me so much I twittered every idiotic move, much to the annoyance of my followers. Bella thinks about two things: how much she hates Forks (go home!) and how much she likes Edward Cullen. Boys boys boys! The book only passes the Bechdel test because Bella discusses her class schedule with the school secretary. She has four local boys chasing after her, and yet she goes for the creepy distant guy who at that point had no redeeming features except for his good looks and designer clothes. Which is fairly normal I’m sure. Just annoying. Worse though is that she likes to claim she’s unattractive. She’s just a little too self-involved to care about. I started rooting for the vampires to cut her up and eat her in the grisliest fashion possible.

After Edward reveals himself, the story picks up and became more bearable. Either that or I became inured to Bella’s whining. Sure, there’s still too much self-flagellating discussion between the two young almost-lovers. He repeats a hundred times that he’s too dangerous to be around her, yet is too selfish to walk away. She breathily pleads for him to never leave her. What sees in her I do not know. Meyer’s narrative says Edward is exceptionally attracted to her scent. Although we boys appreciate a girl who smells nice, T&A is what really attracts us at age 17. But I can indulge Meyer her wish fulfillment scenario where boys are interested in more lofty pursuits.

As I noted, the story picks up. Edward saves Bella with his Superman speed and strength, preventing an out of control van from crushing her tender mortal body. Later he arrives just in time to save Bella from the clutches of dastardly would-be rapists in fair Port Angeles, center of the Northwest’s urban crime zone. Bella even gets to watch a super-fast vampire family baseball game before the evil vampire’s show up and all hell breaks loose. While the alpha-vampire-male playground fight is so derivative the Treasury has to bail it out (yes, I just made a stimulus joke), it’s still fun to watch. Well, except for the fact that Bella passes out when the ultimate confrontation takes place so I didn’t get to see what happens in this exclusively first-person narrative! Bella passes out! Next scene, let’s talk to the winners! Which vampire, the good one or the evil one, gets to claim Bella for books two through however many Meyer will write?

What came to mind multiple times while reading this is Ender’s Game. Yup. The Orson Scott Card (another nebbish Mormon writer) written science fiction classic. That one was all about introverted geek boys realizing their alpha-male fantasies of secret skills that could be revealed if given the right opportunity such as a weightless training school in space for child soldiers. This one is all about introverted geek girls realizing their fantasies of designer clothes, popularity, and Jane Austen style chaste love if only given the right situation such as the school male model heart-throb being a secret vampire. I liked Ender’s Game at the time and failed to see it’s flaws, but with a little bit of self-awareness later in life I came to see it for what it is. The girls who got sucked into Twilight should revel in the fantasy while they can.

Now that I’ve taken one bribe, I must offer the option to all. I’ve got a pretty liberal review policy already, but if you have a book you want reviewed on Rat’s Reading, I am now open to creative bribes as well. Not just any bribe will do, however. If I wasn’t willing to read a free book before, you gotta come up with something really unique or awesome to change my mind. It’s gotta be something good enough to get people to exclaim I can’t believe they did that just to get reviewed for the three schmucks that read that blog! For example, convincing your city to install a bronze bust of me in front of the main library.

Two caveats. This does not guarantee a positive review. Hence, I suggest authors and publicists avoid this opportunity. If it takes a bribe at all, much less one of my envisioned magnitude, to get me to read your book, it’s probably going to be a seriously negative review. Second, all bribes and who made them will be disclosed along with the review. Partially so folks won’t question my editorial integrity, but mostly so everyone can laugh at you (or me).

If that sounds tantalizing, offer me your bribes via Twitter or email at reading kingrat.biz.

Title: Twilight
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Cover creator: Gail Doobinin (designer) / Roger Hagadone (photographer)
Series: Twilight Saga; 1
Imprint / publisher: Little, Brown / Hachette
Format: Paperback
Length: 498 p.
Publication date: September 2006
ISBN-10: 0-316-01584-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-01584-4
Subject: Vampires — Fiction
Subject: High schools — Fiction
Subject: Schools — Fiction
Subject: Washington (State) — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.M57188Tw 2005