BPL Book Review: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower

 

By Cheyenne Trujillo|Birmingham Public Library PR Department

Imagine a world where the United States of America is ravaged by climate change, a drug crisis, and exploitive corporate powers that entrap people in life-binding contracts. 

Picturing the setting of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower might be too easy. Eerily enough, we are only a few years off from Butler’s imagined world set in the year 2024. 

Parable of the Sower begins with the diary entries of fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina. She is surviving this collapsed society with her family in their walled community in Robledo, California. Banding together with their other middle-class neighbors, the Olamina family creates a tolerable life, trusting each member to keep the community alive. 

But Lauren has secrets that might threaten their safety. First, she has a rare condition of hyper-empathy. 

Lauren experiences other people’s pain to the point of bleeding when someone else bleeds. Second, she no longer believes in the vision that her father preaches every Sunday morning, leaning into her own invented religion, Earthseed, instead. 

 Before any of these revelations surface, their gated community is consumed by a blazing fire started by paints—people addicted to causing chaos and the drug Pyro. Forced out of her home and only guaranteed shelter, now eighteen-year-old Lauren must survive with the stragglers that join her along the road, hiding her secrets from the rest of the world. 

This is not an escapist read. Stories typically remove us from reality, but Butler’s novel is like a compilation of news headlines dating back to its 1993 debut. Her words are blunt and graphic. Yet I could not put her book down until I finished it!

Butler’s cunning foresight landed Parable of the Sower on the 2020 New York Times Bestseller list 20 years after its premiere.

Octavia E. Butler’s works are a must read, especially for anyone interested in the sci-fi and Afrofuturist genres. 

Check-out Parable of the Sower from one of the many members of the Jefferson County Library Cooperative, including the Birmingham Public Library.