Parable of the Sower + Parable of the Talents | Book Review

Why I read it: The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents comprise the Earthseed series by Octavia Butler. It was the January pick of the general book club mentioned in my year of book clubs post, chosen post-election to discuss. I won’t ever call something required reading (is that a separate post? maybe!), but this dystopian series holds some hard truths and important messages for the time that we’re in.

Review #insixwords: Our communities are integral to survival.

More:

• The Parable of the Sower begins in 2024. That I read it during the years it’s set lends itself to a very surreal reading experience, even though the books span decades.

• You could list all the similarities these books has to current events (e.g., fires in LA, a president rising to power using the slogan “Make America Great Again”) but I found it deeply rooted in history. If you look at Black Codes in the south or how rights and culture was stripped from indigenous people, you can see the seeds of that in these books.

• The best dystopian fiction is based on what is happening or what has happened in the world, and expanding it. That’s what these books do well. (For my romance readers, the Mercenary Librarians series by Kit Rocha is also a good example.)

• These books are bleak and dark. There is often little relief from the tension of just trying to survive. And yet what underpins the story is a commitment to community, knowledge, and knowledge sharing.

• In a Q&A, Octavia Butler mentions that she originally envisioned these books as a single book. I think you can somewhat see that in the pacing. The Parable of the Sower is slow to start, picking up toward the end, then stopping. The Parable of the Talents has more plot points and contains the bulk of the tension. They’re best read together, though I did prefer Talents. (It’s also the book that grapples with a lot more atrocities, so your mileage may vary. People at book club did mention that Sower starts slower than Talents.)

• There are no clear heroes in this story, and for that, it feels more real. No one person is all good. (Though there are plenty of bad people who are just . . . bad.) Characters were real, flawed. It’s a nuanced take on humans in general.

• Religion is theme throughout the book, both in the main character Lauren’s new religion Earthseed as well as “Christian America,” which is the religious movement gaining popularity in the US. Lauren’s Earthseed is called a cult, but Christian America is its own brand of cult. (Also check out Cultish by Amanda Montell for more about the language of cults.)

• I read a lot for pleasure and entertainment, but sometimes I also read to learn and to think and to grapple with the hard parts of life. These books are definitely the latter kind of reading.

Recommendation: Reading dystopian fiction while we’re in the midst of our own dystopia can be very distressing. I get it! Take care of yourself. I do think that if you can, these books are worth reading. What we need now is community and knowledge sharing, and that’s the hope embedded inside the story. Check your content notes if needed; Butler’s prose is not graphic or gratuitous, but it does depict upsetting situations.

Add the series on StoryGraph | Buy The Parable of the Sower | Buy The Parable of the Talents