Fledgling

So I just finished reading Fledgling by Octavia Butler and to no surprise, I have mixed feelings about the book. I liked the book and I feel that it had potential to be a good trilogy (however, her untimely death is not going to allow this to happen)... BUT the catch is that it was just like Adulthood Rites except the Oankali were replaced by vampires. But I do like how she somehow managed to weave issues of race in here too... not directly, but very subtly.

I am noticing some themes in here books here that are kinda bothering me. In most of her books, she doesn't have black male characters, she just has the one strong black female protagonist. She always has Well this is not totally true because in Wild Seed (from the Seed to Harvest group) there was Doro, and in Fledgling there was her symbiont Joel, and in Kindred, the boyfriend was black, and in Parable of the Sower, Olamina's boyfriend was African. But these characters tend to be foil characters. They don't really have any substance to them. Most of the black female characters develop relationships with white or Asian or Latin men. What does THIS mean?

She also keeps mentioning this them of longing and hunger and the need to human contact YET she professed herself to be a hermit and a loner. This I don't understand. In the Lilith's Brood trilogy the Oankali had a need for physical human contact. One of the ooloi almost died because he had no contact with a human. She also kept mentioning about how humans touch each other. In Fledgling Shori kept mentioning how she needed to be touched by humans and the hunger for blood she always had. I also think this has something to do with addiction. In Bloodchild, the same hunger was expressed through T'Gatoi and her need to touch.

And what is up with the issue of sterility? And these apocalyptic notions? And these bigger than life women?

Butler's books are just so complicated... but when things are really easy, we don't really appreciate them now do we.