Parable of the Sower

I've been in a big reading slump since like mid-November 2020. I've started a lot of books, finished few, and the ones that I have finished have taken me a long time. This was not one of those books. I plowed right through this; I finished the second-half basically in one session.

The story combines some of my favorite elements. It's told from the perspective of an 18-year old girl, Lauren, a girl who grew up in a very different world from her parents and the community around her. That old world is gone, but everyone from her perspective is slow to accept that change except her. The world Lauren knows is an all too possible near-future Earth in the midst of societal collapse, the governments of the 50 states and nations of the world exist — at least nominally — but their reach has drastically diminished. There are police officers and firefighters but neither will come for the majority of incidents unless you can pay for service and even then they might just take your money. If you find yourself in debt and unable to pay, your debtors can lock you into slavery. This post-collapse world becomes a lens for our narrator to develop a new religion she calls Earthseed. Her new faith doesn't just wax and wane woefully about the world that once was, nor does it entirely embrace the new world they're surrounded by. Instead, Earthseed's fundamental idea is that God is change, and that people are agents of that change. The world-building of the societal collapse and this new religion are what kept drawing me back for more.

My biggest issue with the book is the hyper-empathy syndrome that Lauren has. It felt like an idea from another draft, or that Butler had recently read something about synesthesia and thought that could be a compelling hook for a character and it simply didn't get filtered out as the story developed. In a world that seems all too real, the hyper-empathy felt like a curse of magic than reality.