Lush prose, engaging episodic story, and masses to think about. It's all about being Black and queer in America, about blood and home soil, giving and taking about living in a greedy, exploitative, violent place and resisting those things. In the process she finds relationships (no less valid because they can't last) and slowly starts to build a found family. Gilda moves through the decades learning how to trust and finding a place in the world, but it's over a century before she can begin to confront her experience of slavery, and start overcoming the trauma. It may not be a voluntary exchange, of which she's aware, but it is still a form of payment and valuable, because demanding something for nothing and hurting people are in fact wrong. So she uses psychic vampire powers to identify problems and help: open horizons, give self worth, repair memories. She's taken in by a vampire, who turns her with consent and care, and who teaches her the first lesson: you leave something of value in exchange for blood. Gilda (as she becomes) starts off as an escaped slave, a little girl who's fled the cotton fields now her mother has died, leaving her family. I generally don't like vampire books for many many reasons, one of which is that the common trope of 'oh no, I am forced to be an exploitative predator, my trauma' makes me want to punch MCs in the fictional face.
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