Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

Feb 04, 2022 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: diversity, sci-fi-fantasy, philosophy, quest, disaster, death, poverty, on-the-road

Lauren Olamina is keeping a journal of her life amid the nightmare that she and all the people of futuristic California are living. Lauren is a teen and she lives with her family in a protected enclave community in a time where respect for human life is virtually gone. This California of the future is one of the most horrific worlds I've ever seen depicted in books. Mauraders kill for water, clothes, food. Eventually, even Lauren's community is attacked and destroyed and she is forced to go on t ...more

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Mar 16, 2019 Fee rated it really liked it

"I'm trying to speak - to write - the truth. I'm trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them."

This is the second Octavia E. Butler book I've read, after Kindred, and it's a very different beast. Both novels fall in to the YA category but whilst I immediately handed Kindred over to my thirteen year old daughter when I'd finished it, I'd be hesitant to pass Parable of the Sower on. This dystopian nightmare is ...more

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May 08, 2020 Linda Martin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, poverty, families, geo-california, horror, gaaaaaah, philosophy, epistolary, dystopian, 2020

Pastor's kid turned philosopher wants to start her own religion. As a teenager in a disintegrating, frightening Southern California, Lauren Oya Olamina keeps a diary and writes philosophical ideas in a notebook she calls Earthseed: Book of the Living as a more positive reaction to the better-known Egyptian Book of the Dead. Her father preaches in a walled neighborhood where residents band together to try to protect themselves from the very frightening murderous people living outside the gate. La Pastor's kid turned philosopher wants to start her own religion. As a teenager in a disintegrating, frightening Southern California, Lauren Oya Olamina keeps a diary and writes philosophical ideas in a notebook she calls Earthseed: Book of the Living as a more positive reaction to the better-known Egyptian Book of the Dead. Her father preaches in a walled neighborhood where residents band together to try to protect themselves from the very frightening murderous people living outside the gate. Lauren loves her father and never tells him about her intention to leave Christianity and start Earthseed, with herself as founder and leader. She feels compelled to do so. This is her destiny.

Outside the gate there are bodies lying around. People are killed regularly and nobody is decent enough to bury all the corpses. This is a very violent novel and Lauren is so concerned about safety issues, even in her walled community, that she puts together a survival pack, something we now might call a bug-out bag. She talks her well-armed father into letting her practice using his guns. She wants to be ready for anything because the world is bad and getting worse.

I wanted to call this a post-apocalyptic novel but the nature of the apocalypse was only hinted at. Climate? Economics? Something like that. Water is no longer free - it must be purchased, but that's not much different than today as we're all paying for water to be delivered to our homes, right?

It seems like society is in the process of falling apart... it still resembles what we have today but with slight changes. The police department must be paid to investigate anything, so often they're not called because most people can't afford the cost. The freeways are no longer being used for vehicles, but make a great walking path for those going a long distance. I've had dreams like that, in my younger years... I dreamed of people living on, camping on, walking on the Eastshore Freeway between Richmond and Oakland, California - the area I was raised in. But this novel starts considerably south of there - near Los Angeles in a town called Robledo.

I wanted to give this two stars because it is super-violent and I didn't like the idea of Christianity being replaced by Earthseed. I gave it an extra star for imagination. I read this for several reasons.

1. I read Octavia Butler's stand-alone novel, Kindred, last year and loved it.

2. I do the PopSugar Reading Challenge each year and decided this would do for 2020's prompt #32: A book by a woman of color.

3. I'm a Booktuber on YouTube, doing the Maybe Midrash Readathon during May 2020. We're to choose one fiction and one nonfiction book to read, on some aspect of religion. Any religion. I chose to read this novel.

4. I like to read post-apocalyptic fiction. This was almost post-apocalyptic albeit without a clear apocalypse... more just a slow breakdown of civilization.

Lauren Oya Olamina was a very angry young lady, but that was tempered by her loving respect for her father. Unfortunately she never bonded with Jesus, thus Earthseed was born. I noted in Octavia Butler's Wikipedia page she was raised Baptist, and wondered if this novel was semi-autobiographical insofar as her feelings about religion are concerned. ...more

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May 29, 2017 Stacey rated it liked it

Post apocalyptic, I feel like I've had enough of these maybe? Too close to potential
Reality? Yikes. It was similar to The Road, dark, a little grisly but a little more hopeful. It's ends on a good note. I was glad I hung on as the first half was a bit of a drag. ...more

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