Reviews

Wilde Saat by Octavia E. Butler

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blankpagealex's review against another edition

4.0

Wild Seed features two central characters who are difficult to categorize and that ambiguity is precisely what makes them so fascinating. This story was hard to get into at first as the stakes were never entirely clear, but once I became accustomed to Butler's writing style, this became hard to put down and made me want to check out more of the author's work.

lovelykd's review against another edition

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It’s impossible to rate this book. While the dialogue and the plot were …interesting, I struggled to adapt to the ideas presented. At the end of the day, the philosophy of Doro disgusted me; he was far too cavalier about human life and his marketplace approach to reproduction was …a lot to deal with at times.

Hopefully the next book in the series is a bit better—the way this ended gave me a measure of hope—but I won’t be rating this read.

jkohn's review against another edition

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dark medium-paced

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

3.75

celiapowell's review against another edition

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4.0

This novel about two essentially immortal beings - Anyanwu, a shapeshifter (brilliant, healer, carer) and Doro (a horrifying spirit who must move from body to body, leaving corpses behind) - and occurs over quite a long period of time. Doro brings Anyanwu from Africa to America, and makes her part of one of his "villages" - villages he creates and controls in order to breed people with special abilities for him to one day inhabit.

Spoiler

I hate that Anyanwu doesn't maintain her rage at Doro throughout this book, and seems to end with a kind of resignation of "oh well, I guess we're both immortal together", because Doro is a monster and I want to see him die horribly... but I get the sense he might get his comeuppance in the next book in the series, so I'm keen to read that.