tl;dr: Really interesting book. If you like Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles then I think you will like this, lots of interesting biological ideas to contemplate!
My wife Meagan recommended this book to me after she read it for her Gender, Bodies, & Technology course at VaTech. She loved it and the author is widely praised in the world of this type of fiction so I decided to check it out. I enjoyed reading it, the main 2 characters have some really cool abilities that were fun to read about. Anyanwu can ingest new items (poisons, spoiled food, etc.) and figure out how they change/effect “her” body and then modify her body to deal with them (“her” is in quotes here because she is also a shape shifter and changes her sex/gender throughout the book). I liked seeing all the different troubles she went through and how she internalized them to try and figure out how to mitigate them. The other main character, Doro, is a “jumper” that can take over bodies at will. The interaction between him and Anyanwu is a great read so check out the book!
There is apparently a trilogy associated with the characters in this book which I have been meaning to pick up. I am interested to see how Butler’s world unfolds and how the characters interplay with each other.