A review by hannahmcjean
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler

challenging dark tense

3.5

I found this book compelling, very well written and impressively imaginative. It’s strange & uncomfortable in a way I haven’t come across much before.

The world building is brilliant, and successfully built intrigue that kept me needing to know more. The situation that Lilith finds herself in is creepy, disturbing, frustrating, and Butler successfully provoked instinctive emotional reactions from me as I read. 

The first half of this book really hooked me, but it began to lose me from about the halfway mark. I found that the relationships between characters were insufficiently built up - i.e. a lot of the relationship development happened ‘off-page’ and the reader was simply told how they feel toward each other, and so it felt unearned. 

Additionally, I found Butler’s portrayal of humanity on the whole rather pessimistic. I do know that humans have the capacity for brutality & hate, but I think just as much as compassion and community, and I wish she had painted a more complex picture of the humans’ responses to their new lives in captivity.

And more than anything, I was surprised and disappointed with how much comp-het this book shoves down the reader’s throat in the second half - especially given the gender queerness explored in the extraterrestrial society, and the interspecies ‘genetic trading’ that was a major plot point. It felt like a strange reinforcement of biological reductionism in both gender and sexuality, as if the humans’ and Oankali’s differing gender/sex performances are supposed to be ‘natural’, with no variation except in cases of ‘unnatural’ interference. I know this book was written in the 80s, but this was extreme and felt pretty icky.

Overall, I’m still very impressed by the creativity of the premise and plot, and found the questions it prompts about who we become/are forced to become in controlling environments pretty interesting. I’ll definitely read the rest of the series, but with some caution given the critiques I had of this first one.