Saturday, March 19, 2011

More on Fledgling

I read Octavia Butler's Fledgling about a year ago and expressed my distaste at its positive depiction of pedophilia. Although Shori is actually 53 years old, she has the body of a ten-year-old girl and is still considered a child by her culture. HELL NO. Also, the writing was blah.

Womanist Musings, one of my favorite social justice blogs, recently published a post, co-authored by blogmaster Renee and frequent contributor Sparky, that I agree with 100%. Not only do they take Butler to task on the pedophilia issue, they also point out that the Ina's aphrodesiac-like venom is extremely rape-ish and discuss some the book's racial problems as well. I recommend this piece very strongly. Like Sparky and Renee, I simply cannot believe so many people rave about Fledgling while blatantly ignoring the freaking child sex, among other things.

Read their post here.

3 comments:

rhapsodyinbooks said...

Cool, I haven't read it yet, but I'm saving all this info for when I do (I got it for Christmas)

@parridhlantern said...

This sounds a bit like " I haven't dreamed of flying for a while" by Taichi Yamada. In this a 47yr old man meets a 67 yr old women, when next they meet she's 20 yrs younger and the next time .., I and the male character wonder what will happen ( I think I stated in my post were we headed towards Nabakov?" but it's resolved before that point

Eileen said...

Jill: Can't wait to hear what you think!

Parrish: That sounds like one weird book. So what happens when she turns 17 again? If she went back another twenty years, she'd be -3.

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