A young woman with intriguing ideas about religion has to make her way across California with a destitute band of survivors after her gated community is destroyed. Not an optimistic view of our future, but a great read. Likewise its sequel, Parable of the Talents, in which all of the heroine's plans are destroyed and we lose a little sympathy with her.

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This book is riveting. It's the story, told by a hyperempathetic California teenager, of American society in 2024, about ten or fifteen years after ecological collapse.

We meet Lauren, the narrator, when she's about fifteen years old. She's a bright, contemplative preacher's daughter, who has decided that she has found her own God: change. The book is sprinkled with discussions of her beliefs, which she's named Earthseed, and free verse from her "Book of the Living". By her eighteenth birthday, terrifying new synthetic drugs and an "eat the rich" mentality have taken hold outside Los Angeles, and the American government has relaxed business laws to the extent that debt slavery has become more common than ever.

Lauren is a wise, clever, and sympathetic protagonist, and the world she inhabits is engaging and perhaps a little too plausible. I plowed through this book in just a few hours, always eager to find out what would happen next, who'd make it through to the next chapter, and what was on each new character's mind.

(One further note -- I know plenty of folks who require a touch of the fantastic in their reading. If you're one of those people, you may as well know: This is NOT sci-fi. It takes place in the future and there's one mention of an improbably tiny radio. That's all you get.) ( )

For once, I'm thankful that my imagination is not particularly visual—if it had been, I think I might well have found Parable of the Sower too difficult to read. Butler is unsparing in her creation of a dystopia which seems scarily possible; a world where global warming has devastated the planet, wreaking havoc with the water supply and causing near-total societal breakdown.

I enjoyed Butler's prose, which is elegant and vivid, and admired the thoroughness of her word building (world destruction?) but really only liked the book as a whole. The pacing was a little off, somehow; the first half of the book was very slow, and the ending felt more like a prelude than a resolution. I wasn't sold on the 'Sharer' idea, which seemed a little random and rather too mystical in a book so otherwise realistic. Similarly, I wasn't taken with the Earthseed religion which Lauren founds—to me, her ideas seemed much less deep and meaningful than they were intended to be, occasionally even a little hokey—and I was frustrated at not being able to tell if Butler intended for Lauren's beliefs to be profound or if she was deliberately making them somewhat naive. ( )

Octavia Butler was the best kind of sci-fi writer - the kind who use the futuristic or fantastic element, not to make something go boom for the sake of going boom, but to push the boundary, pick at the scab and say something amazing, and maybe a little scary, about our world.

This may not be a preachy book, but its certainly not subtle. Class warfare (literally), a ravaged environment, human trafficking - these are the things Lauren and the other characters in this book struggle with. These aren't easy things to deal with, but it helps that the book is beautifully written and ultimately hopeful. Butler's prose and the Earthseed poetry she's included are lyrical and compelling.

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