Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - Parable of the Sower

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Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

84 reviews

sammymilfort's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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nonamenogender's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

I loved many aspects of this book. I think the slow descent into chaos is more realistic and frightening than a nuclear apocalypse. I think Lauren is an interesting and compelling protoganist. I love how we are experiencing this story through her journal entries, and Lauren's account is not 100% reliable. My biggest criticism of this book is how it portrays and discusses substance use.

The crazies/paints/junkies in the book are all murderous psychopaths who take pleasure in burning things and people. They are portrayed as less than human, monsters. And their behavior IS monstrous, but we get no explanation for this other than the drug makes watching fire better than sex. None of the primary characters, other than Keith, who is also a monster, use drugs.

The moment I kept waiting for that never came was either for Lauren to meet a drug user who doesn't fulfill the mold established earlier, or for the crazies to be more than just junkies, and some kind of violent political group or criminal enterprise. But no, their violence is always senseless and brutal.

This wouldn't bother me so much if the drug "pyro" wasn't such a major part of the storytelling. It plays on the racist fears around the crack epidemic, but not in any way that challenges them. The only hint that how Lauren describes drug users is not accurate to the world she lives in, is that her perspective is often naive, and sometimes narrow minded. Butler says the parable books are what she imagined could happen if the worst of societies problems were allowed to continue unchecked. in that context, "pyro" is the least realistic aspect of the book.

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elg1105's review

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dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.75

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emergencily's review

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4.25

Written in the 1990s, the novel is set in the year 2024 in a USA on the brink of total apocalypse due to climate change, political collapse, and wealth inequality (familiar?). The government is an ineffectual farce, and a newly elected fascist, hyper-conservative president vows to "Make America Great Again" by driving out the undesirables of society and repealing labour protections to open the door for corporations to enslave workers in modern company towns. The social safety net is nonexistent; police and firefighters are corrupt and bloodthirsty; nightmarishly violent crimes are the norm, particularly against women and racialized people as gender and race relations deteriorate; and companies with monopolies on food and water drive prices to untenable levels.

The teenaged protagonist, Lauren, lives in a small, majority Black gated community just outside LA, led by her pastor father. As the world deteriorates around them, Lauren loses faith in the Christian teachings her father preaches, and begins to secretly develop her own religious system that she calls "Earthseed" -- the belief that change is the only constant and akin to God, and that humanity is destined to leave the doomed earth and live in the stars. Her community is poor, but relative to the desperate poverty outside their guarded walls, downright privileged. They manage to eke out a living through mutual aid and redistribution of their scant resources and running armed watches. This tenuous peace is shattered when invaders knock down the walls. With the few survivors left, Lauren decides to travel north to try to seek refuge across the border in Canada. Along the way, she picks up other survivors and spreads belief in Earthseed among their small group.

I thought the world that Butler built was fascinating and eerie, like a funhouse mirror reflection of our current world. She captured all the same sociopolitical and environmental problems we have and dialed them to a hypothetical max, envisioning the apocalypse as a slow, downward spiral wrought by environmental devastation. The world as we know it ends with a long whimpering death knell, not a bang. I can imagine how fresh this book's take on a post-apocalyptic world was when it was published in the 90s, with its deliberate focus on a Black woman's experiences, on imagining the shape of race and gender relations in a crumbling empire, and its parallels of slavery imagined in a future fascist state. It was horrifying, scary and a crazy page-turner that I stayed up to finish in one night.

But I felt like the climax of the book (the destruction of the community) came a little early. The second half of the book sort of fizzles out and drags on repetitively as she wanders down the highway picking up stray survivors. Like a monster-of-the-week format show, every chapter she finds a scrappy and vulnerable survivor, earns their trust, and inducts them into Earthseed - wash and repeat like 10 times in a row.

I also felt like it was hard to understand Lauren's Earthseed religion and her emotional stakes in it, although a lot of her core beliefs were super fascinating -- the idea of God as a Trickster, as an intangible and ever-changing concept. But at times, I felt that Earthseed existed less as a religion with actual impact on the world and characters than as sprinkled blocks of exposition in the book. Maybe it was my own problem connecting to it as a generally not very spiritual person myself? But I also know she planned this series as a trilogy (sadly passing before she could complete the third book) so it's possible she handles the Earthseed plotline and religious themes more in depth in later books.

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