Absolutely blew my mind while also reminding me that Octavia Butler was a genius and we may never experience the power and scope of her imagination again. I wasn't familiar with Butler's Patternist series about energy vampires before this. Parker maps Octavia Butler's Patternist series onto the Black Women's Club Movement and an ethics of care in ways that make me see that a vampire series can be a guidebook for building a better society.

In a later chapter, mapping the Anita Hill testimony during the Clarence Thomas appointment hearings and the abominable way Hill was treated in the media onto Octavia Butler's "Fledgling" is so effective that I was ANGRY reading this.