This week, I read two excellent speculative fiction selections from women of color.
Image from Amazon
My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (library ebook): I’ve been wanting to read this FOR.EVER. and it finally came in as a hold and y’all, it does not disappoint.
It’s the story of how favorite daughter Ayoola’s boyfriends always seem to end up dead, and how bigger sister Korede always ends up cleaning up her sister’s messes so she doesn’t get caught.
Korede is the practical one, the one who knows that you can’t just straight bleach everything without it getting noticed, the one promoted to head nurse at her job for her practical competence. She resents her sister’s sociopathic indifference, but she also loves her fiercely, enough to protect her from a menacing family past that’s only hinted at in masterful flashback as maybe the beginning of Ayoola’s urges.
But then Ayoola starts dating the doctor Korede has a crush on, and Things Get Messy. Korede’s loyalties and sense of what’s proper are torn in two different directions, and her half-assed lunges at the Right Thing for either side just makes the inevitable come faster.
I loved this book. It was so pitch-perfect, told through the perfect point of view - Korede is caring and harbors intense feelings, but she’s also practical to a fault, and that goes in absurd directions when she can’t figure out another way to deal with things no big sister should have to put up with.
And Ayoola is painted as somewhat silly, vain, and clueless, but with enough humanity to believe Korede wants to protect her. Ayoola also has other traits (and amazing sewing skills) that fully flesh her out, which is a nice change when superficial women are so often portrayed as one-dimensional.
The storytelling is percussive and peppered with casual details of their life in Laos, Nigeria, as an upper-middle-class family who lost their father but are carrying on fine without him. Their mom is also concerned mostly with appearance, but in that way that a lot of moms are - like, “Everything’s great here! Look how well we’re doing!” It’s a mix of Korede’s need for clean surfaces and Ayoola’s for her own perfect personal presentation, so it makes the sisters believable as relatives even as they’re so different in their thoughts and actions.
And the ending is both ominous and full of justice, understated and fits exactly into the tone of the story, and I’m not going to tell you the specifics because you need to read this to appreciate its perfection.
Readers’ Advisory: I’ll be honest, I’m kind of stumped on this one. Which I count as a good thing - it’s such a unique book. I will say that if you like character-based thrillers but are so tired of their tropes and beats you could write your own in your sleep, this will be a delightful shakeup for you.
Fledgling, by Octavia Butler (new paperback): Got this at Firestorm Books & Coffee, in Asheville, NC, another stop on our anarchist spaces tours. We’ve been there a couple times now and it’s a great place for a mix of popular, classic, and under-the-radar radical books.
Like Butler (she’s definitely a Classic). Fledgling caught my eye because I read the Lilith’s Brood trilogy and Kindred a few years ago, and I love the way she approaches sci fi. She lays everything out in clear prose and straight lines of thought, which maps out her worlds and their workings easily and as natural discoveries of the characters. For the most part, her approach lets her avoid the massive exposition dumps of hard sci fi or the important unanswered questions of more arty stuff.
Fledgling is about a girl who wakes up to discover she’s a vampire and her family was destroyed in the middle of a civil war because she’s a genetic experiment created to be able to survive during the day. Only she discovers this gradually, since she’s got a head injury that’s rendered her a total amnesiac. She hooks up with a human dude who becomes her first symbiont and helps her get back to her people, and the other vampires are excited to see her alive except for those who think she’s an abomination, so they have this council trial thing to decide whether to condemn the vampires who did this.
Shori (as her name is remembered) is a combination of everyperson and protagonist, which makes her great for leading us into this unknown subculture that’s hiding all around us. She’s super strong but has to learn how to temper herself, how to re-learn everything about her own people, how to make her way without her family. She has a definite will that doesn’t always get its way just because she’s the chosen one of sorts, and she has her own sense of justice that has to conform to what she learns of the Ina culture.
I like how Butler plays with vampire lore, what she keeps and what she discards or shows as a distortion. In this book, the Ina don’t turn humans into vampires or kill them when they feed; they make humans their symbionts, which creates a powerful bond between them, most analogous to romantic sexual partners in humans. There’s a whole web of etiquette for acquiring and keeping symbionts and how you treat others’ partners; again, a lot like human dating, only with more permissive sex stuff.
A lot of Butler’s writings can be amended with “only with more permissive sex stuff.” Which is part of why she’s so groundbreaking, of course. I like her visions of communal relationships. They’re not quite wide-open polyamorous free-for-alls - they acknowledge personal tastes (literally, a lot of times) and consent and difficult emotions. But they do normalize the possibility/necessity for more than one partner for life or at the same time. She makes sure to detail that everyone becomes bonded in one way or another, and that feels like the realist part of her fiction.
However, I will note one gross thing about this in Fledgling. Shori, for all intents, purposes, and views, is a ten-year-old girl when she gets picked up by the dude who will become her first symbiont. He’s 23. After she bites him, they start having sex.
Agh. Okay. So when she discovers she’s an Ina and way older than she looks - cue the sigh of relief. She’s actually 53 years old.
But my discomfort started right back up again a bit later when she discovered that since the Ina live for multiple centuries, 53 isn’t considered much older than 10 would be in human years, and that she won’t be ready to mate even in the vampire world for a while yet.
So not actually better, then. Awesome.
That icked me out, but the rest of the exploration of Ina culture and mannerisms was fascinating and well-written and expertly calibrated to be revealed as they had to put them to the test to try and fix Shori’s life.
This is kind of the bizzaro Twilight, in that it explores the same themes of consent and otherdom and dealing with prejudice sometimes even from your own kind, and lots of tall thin blonde dudes in velvet have a heavy hand in deciding the fate of a hidden world in danger.
Only it’s better, like a metric shit-ton better. Fledgling succeeds in drawing you in and showcasing a strong female protagonist and expertly twists vampire tropes to shed light on issues of dealing with discrimination when you can’t help being who (or what) you are.
This book also has a brief mention of “daywalking,” which, of course, gives me an excuse to share this:
Readers’ Advisory: Please oh please read you some Octavia Butler if you have not already. Of her works that I’ve read, Kindred is the easiest to get into. It’s much more based in the real world and is therefore a good introduction to Butler’s style. The Lilith’s Brood series is much more esoteric and hard sci fi (as in focused on the details and tech of how other worlds work), more explain-y than plot-driven; a showcase for Butler’s world-building rather than character or story work (although those are still good, too, they’re just not as important here). Fledgling is a great middle ground between the two.
I’m planning on getting to the rest of her oeuvre sooner or later and will report back! Read on (and wash your hands)!