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.

Kindred

By Octavia E. Butler

A graphic novel adaptation by Damian Duffy and  John Jennings

A young black woman finds herself magically transported back in time to the days of southern plantations and slavery, summoned to save the young life of her distant ancestor.
Dana and her husband had just moved into a new place when she felt dizzy and abruptly found herself on a riverbank, arriving just in time to rescue a little boy who was drowning. The boy was Rufus, the son of the man who owned the plantation and Dana's great-something grandfather. As Rufus told her later, as he was drowning he had a vision of Dana and somehow called her to him and to his time, 1810.
Time and again Rufus would call Dana back to the past and she was forced to experience the terrible reality of being a black person in the time of slavery, even to the point of enduring a whipping and being forced to work in the fields. And even though she tries her best to educate Rufus, his white privilege and selfishness prevents him from taking it to heart and he, when he is grown, he forces himself on the woman who would become Dana's great-something grandmother. But once the child of that rape is born, Dana's ancestor, Dana is at last free to end Rufus' domination over her life and return to the future where she belongs.

What the author wants to do here is look at the life and hardships of a slave from the view point of a modern educated woman and she uses the gimmick of time travel to achieve that end.
This is a depressing story and brings home the terrible tragedy of slavery in all of its cruelty, selfishness and ignorance. It's a disturbing read and lays bare one of the ugly truths of America's past.

Ghost Cat

By Beverly Butler
Annabel's mother has a boyfriend and she wants to spend the summer with the boyfriend and so Annabel gets shipped off to Wisconsin to live with her great aunt and uncle and various cousins for the summer. Annabel doesn't approve of her mother's new boyfriend and she resents being sent away.
The three teen cousins staying there too are Donna, Michael and Todd. These three have spent the summer there for several years and that makes Annabel an instant outsider. Especially intolerant is fifteen-year-old Todd, who call Annabel Clarabel the Cow, poking fun of the fact that Annabel is tall for her age (and much taller than Todd).
A few weeks before leaving for Wisconsin, Annabel's cat Muffin died. So not only is Annabel dealing with her mother's new circumstances, she is also grieving the loss of a beloved pet. She wakes up early one morning to the sound of a cat crying. She goes outside, worried about the cat and wanders into the woods where she is found by Old Pa, Aunt Lil's father who lives with his daughter and her husband. He tells her to leave the cat be and adds, "She'll be stirring soon...Always when there's young folks by. That's when she doesn't rest easy."
"She" turns out to be a neighbor, Julia Craig, who mysteriously vanished one day. She had a kerfluffle with Annabel's Uncle Alex long before Annabel was even born. She accused him of poisoning her cat and, ever since her disappearance, suspicion has fallen on Uncle Alex.
Now her spirit walks the night along with her ghost cat. And Julia has set her sights on Annabel because they have a connection about which Annabel knows nothing. The answer to the riddle can only be found in Julia's abandoned and decaying house.

For a kid's book, the was a pretty good read. The Julia Craig mystery was interesting and its solution neat and clever. The baggage caused by the mystery afflicts the whole group, as the Aunt and Uncle refuse to talk about it and Uncle Alex even gets a little hostile. Plus, Annabel has to deal with the constant put downs of evil cousin Toad, oops, I mean Todd.
The mystery was clever and engaging enough for an adult to enjoy yet remain on a level that would not be too scary for younger readers.