The Parable of the Sower

Octavia Butler

Completed 4/16/2018, Reviewed 4/16/2018

5 stars

This was a dark, depressing novel.  It’s a dystopian tale of a future US where society has broken down, crime is rampant, and survival is tenuous.  I could only read it in small chunks, a few chapters at a time at the most.  Nonetheless, it was an excellent story about survival in a terrible time.  I’ve seen some reviewers categorize this book as YA, and the prose somewhat reads as YA, but I think it’s really a story for adults about a young person with a personal faith and the will to survive. 

The book is about Lauren, a young African-American girl growing up in an LA suburb in the 2020’s.  Society has broken down and her little cul-de-sac has built a wall around the eleven houses on the street to protect itself.  Money is practically worthless and few people have jobs that pay actual money.  Crime is rampant, with desperate people stealing to survive, and people addicted to a new drug called pyro are burning everything in sight.  Lauren’s little community has banded together to learn survival and defense skills.  They help each other out, even if they don’t like each other.  Her mother acts as a teacher of the local children.  Her father is a preacher and a professor at the local college. 

Lauren however is different.  She an empath, she can feel other people’s physical pain and pleasure.  She’s basically rejected her father’s Baptist faith and devised her own religion, which she calls Earthseed.  She also feels that the key to her survival in this terrible world is to try to travel north to a safer land. 

One night, extreme violence invades the community.  She’s forced to leave before she was ready, but decides it’s the only choice she has.  On her way north, she picks up a ragtag group of others who she slowly converts to Earthseed. 

Butler’s vision is astounding.  This dystopia is about as well-devised as some of the post-nuclear apocalypse stories of the fifties and sixties.  And yet she leaves it vague as to exactly what the cause was, other than the inevitable collapse of things based on where we seem to be going.  The little community that the first half of the book takes place in is what I would call excellent world-building, even though it’s only eleven houses.  From target practice to martial arts training to what dinner consists of, Butler gives us an amazingly intimate portrait of what life would be like in a terrible time.

The character development is also astounding.  Despite there being a lot of characters throughout the story, I felt like Butler did a really great job of creating distinct personalities.  It says a lot when I can keep myriads of characters straight in my head. 

But as I mentioned above, it was a really difficult book to get through.  The world-building is so good, that I could only read small portions at a time lest I get too depressed, and convinced that this is where we are going to end up if things don’t change.

I’m both excited and hesitant about reading the next book, because I know it will be more of the same.  I think I’m going to read a few other books in between so as to break up the feelings of hopelessness that one could get from reading a book like this.

I have to give this book five stars out of five because of my definition of my star system. It’s a book that I would give four stars to but I had a deep emotional response to it.  Usually, that feeling is joy or sorrow.  This time it was depression and despair.  For a book to evoke that much emotion in me says something about how terrific it is.  Granted they were emotions that I would rather not have but they were deep nonetheless.