Fledgling 2

I've noticed a sort of slave owner- slave relationship between the Ina and their symbiants. We've talked about how they both seem to need each other. The Ina need the symbiants for food and energy, and the symbiants will die if they aren't exposed to enough of their Ina's venom. This can be compared to the way slave owners needed slaves to do the work that they couldn't handle all by themselves, and the slaves didn't necessarily need the slave owners, but would have had nowhere else to go in a land full of animosity towards them. I think it is safe to say the Ina are the ones being compared to the slaves in this book, however. When Brook is describing some of the Ina's history, she says, "...physically, he and most Ina fit in badly wherever they go- tall, ultrapale, lean, wiry people. They usually looked like foreigners, and when times got bad they were treated like foreigners- suspected, disliked, driven out, or killed" (136). So either way you look at it, there is support for the suggestions of the Ina or the symbiants being compared to slaves, or an opressed race in general.
I thought it was very interesting when Brook and Shori were talking about where the Ina species came from and some stories about what they are doing on earth. I saw a comparison to Toni Morisson's "Paradise" when Brook says, "Some future generation of them is supposed to leave this world en masse and go to paradise- or back to the homeworld" (137). This really reminded me of the last lines of "Paradise," and just the whole idea that these people are all looking for some idea of home or paradise.
Also, I am starting to warm up to this book, though I still think it is far less superior to those we have read previously. :)