Fledgling

 

By Octavia E. Butler

A creature wakes up in a cave, hungry and in terrible pain. It doesn't know why it is in a cave or how it got there but it does know it is gravely injured and in extreme pain. It suffers, not understanding how it came to be in such awful condition.

A man enters the cave. The creature senses him and knows the man is approaching. As the man reaches for the creature, it attacks and kills him and consumes his body. It doesn't know he was a man, all it knows is that it needs to eat to heal and survive.

Time passes, the creature heals. It can now see again. It craves raw meat, raw meat is the only thing that will save it. It leaves the cave and hunts. At first smaller creatures, but as its strength returns, larger animals. Eventually it is strong enough to catch, kill and devour large animals, like deer.

It heals. It mind grows stronger, it's body grows stronger. It's instinct pulls toward a particular place, a place that should be home. But instead it is a burned ruin of torched buildings. The creature can smell the lingering scent of death. The place seems dangerous and frightening. No help will be found here. It scrabbles around in the ashes and unearths a few garments that survived the fire. It dresses itself and leaves. 

But it realizes it needs more than just raw meat. It heads out, looking for something, what is not exactly clear to it. Coming to a road, it encountered a vehicle, which it recognized was car. The car stopped and the man inside asked it if it was OK.

At first it didn't understand the man but suddenly understanding came. When he offered it a ride, it eagerly accepted. The man smelled so enticing to it. He wanted to take it to the hospital, but it strongly refused. He asked its name. But it could not remember ever having a name.

The man gave it a choice: either consent to going to the hospital or go to the police station. It bit him when he grabbed its arm. The blood attracted it and it licked the blood off his hand. The man was startled but relaxed as it licked his hand. He was puzzled because the action of the creature drinking his blood had been pleasurable. The creature told him he tasted good. He brought the creature closer and it latched onto his neck, dining on the man's blood. The man said that he was enjoying it and that it felt fantastic. The man laughed and called the creature a vampire and took it him with him. He even gave it a name, Renee. 

It looked like a ten-year-old little girl. It was female, and still young. But it was not ten-years-old. It was many decades older than the man. And it was a vampire. A vampire with no memory of its past, no memory of how it came to be injured and in a cave, no memory of the burned and destroyed homestead, no memory of its actual name. 

But with the man's help she will seek those who so cruelly tried to end her life and in the process killed her memory of her past and murdered all the her loved ones, even though her memory of them is lost.

So this is the story of Renee/Shori, a "young" vampire girl from a colony of vampires. She finds out that her people were combining vampire DNA with human DNA in order to create a breed of vampires who are not adversely affect by daylight and the sun's rays. Shori is the most successful result of those experiments, able to be out and active in the daytime, able to function if dressed in clothing that covers her skin, with a hat and sunglasses when outside. It was this ability to stay awake in the daytime that enabled her to escape the attack on the homestead where she lived with her vampire family and friends, even though she was badly injured. 

The power behind the attack has not given up though. They are determined to end Shori, viewing her existence as unnatural and disgusting. And they don't care how many people they have to murder, how many homes they have to burn to bring about her end.

This was an OK read. It started out pretty interesting. But then it just got repetitive and tedious, especially when it got to the trial of the guilty persons. I found the last part very boring and just skipped through most of it.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

I Am Not Sidney Portier

 

By Percival Everett

I did not know this when I read this book, but many parts of it are based on movies that starred Sidney Poitier. Most of these movies are unknown to me. Having knowledge of these movies would, in my opinion, help the reader make better sense of the story.

Sidney Poitier movies the book references:

Chapter Two ~~ The Defiant Ones 1958; A Patch of Blue 1965; Band of Angels 1957

Chapter Four ~~ Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 1967; No Way Out 1950

Chapter Five ~~ Lilies of the Field 1963; Buck and the Preacher 1972

Chapter Six ~~ In the Heat of the Night 1967; They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! 1970

Not Sidney Poitier is the full name of the main character of the story, an orphan boy whose mother, before she died, invested in Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting when it was just starting out, leaving her son Not Sidney with a large fortune. Ted Turner takes the boy into his home and that's where Not Sidney grows up. 

His name causes him a lot of problems, especially in school. He gets bullied a lot and Ted hires instructors to guide Not Sidney. He eventually drops out of high school and he buys a car and sets out for California from Atlanta, Georgia. He soon run afoul of some racist country Georgia cops who arrest Not Sidney. A prison transport bus crashes and Not Sidney escapes but chained to another prisoner, Patrice, who is as racist as the cops who arrested Not Sidney.

Not Sidney manages to find his way back to Ted Turner and then decides he wants to try attending college. Even though he is a dropout, he pretty much bribes the school to let him in. Oddly, one of his professors has the same name as the author of this book, Percival Everett. School turns out to be pretty much a waste of Not Sidney's time, but he does meet a girl who invites him home for Thanksgiving with her family. Her family are mixed race people who are not pleased to see their daughter is dating a dark skinned man. But the father does some snooping into Not Sidney's background and discovers that he is extremely wealthy which immediately changes everyone's opinion about Not Sidney. He breaks up with the girl and leaves.

He embarks again on a car trip to California and it goes about as badly as the first trip did. He gets into trouble when his car breaks down and he gets involved with some religious kooks and local racist cops. 

He wriggles out of trouble once again and decides to give up driving to California. He takes a plane instead. Smart move.

I found the first part of the story, Chapter One, boring. The portrayals of Ted Turner and Jane Fonda were kind of mean, I felt. Of course, I have no idea what Ted and Jane are like in reality so maybe the portrayals are spot on. I still didn't like it. 

The story picked up once Not Sidney left home. The adventures were slightly familiar, the prison bus escape and him chained to another prisoner and running to avoid being captured did remind me of an old movie I might have seen as a kid. (I think the only other Poitier movie I saw was Lilies of the Field, but it was so long ago I did not catch the reference to it in Chapter Five.) The story certainly got more entertaining and more amusing when Not Sidney was having his adventures as a young man. It's just too bad I didn't know about all the movies that it referenced along the way. I think I would have enjoyed it much more if I had known. 

Thank you to Wikipedia for enlightening me about the old movies!

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Oreo

 

By Fran Ross

An Oreo is a person who looks black but who has a white soul, I guess. Not too sure about that, really.

Christine Schwartz had a black mother and a white Jewish father. When she was just a toddler, her parents split and her father vanished from her life. But he left behind a list of clues that would help Christine find him when she got old enough. 

So when she is about 14 or 15, she set out to track down her missing father, following the very cryptic clues he left to help her in her quest:

1. Sword and sandals
2. Three legs
3. The great divide
4. Sow
5. Kicks
6. Pretzel
7. Fitting
8. Down by the River
9. Temple
10. Lucky number
11. Amazing
12. Sails

Christine, who also goes by Oreo, sets out on her journey to find her father based on this list. She rather accidentally solves the clues given her and has various adventures, mostly once she reaches New York City. She does track down her father but it doesn't end well.

I didn't know this when I was reading the story, but Christine's quest is based on the travels of Theseus. Now, I am not a person who cares about mythology so I didn't catch on to this until the end of the book where the last chapter is the author explaining the how Christine's quest is based on Theseus. At the end of that chapter is list matching the characters to the characters in the Theseus story:

• Aegeus — Samuel Schwartz, Christine's father
• Aethra — Helen Clark, Christine's mother
• Apollo Delphinius — Apollo Theatre
• Ariadne — Adriana Minotti
• Cephissus — Jordan River's sauna
• Cercyon — Kirk, a large, dangerous man
• Heracles — Uncle Herbert, Christine's great uncle
• Medea — Mildred Schwartz, Samuel Schwartz's wife
• Minos — Minotti, a business associate of Samuel Schwartz
• Minotaur — Toro, a bulldog
• Pandion — Jacob Schwartz, Christine's grandfather, Samuel's father
• Pasiphae — Bovina Minotti, wife of Minotti
• Periphetes — Perry, a thief (gonif) who tried to attack Christine in NYC
• Phaea — Pig killed by a taxi
• Pittheus — James Clark, Christine's grandfather
• Procrustes — Manager of a shoe store in NYC
• Sciron — Parnell the pimp who kidnapped Christine
• Sinis — Joe Doe, a bad little boy in a NYC park
• Theseus — Christine Schwartz

I didn't care for the book. I didn't know it was a parody of the Theseus myth. If I had known that, I probably wouldn't have bought the book. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.