Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel: The powerful and compelling sequel to the dystopian classic Parable of the Sower Lauren Olamina was only eighteen when her family was killed, and anarchy encroached on her Southern California home. She fled the war zone for the hope of quiet and safety in the north. There she founded Acorn, a peaceful community based on a religion of her creation, called Earthseed, whose central tenet is that God is change. Five years later, Lauren has married a doctor and given birth to a daughter. Acorn is beginning to thrive. But outside the tranquil group’s walls, America is changing for the worse. Presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarret wins national fame by preaching a return to the values of the American golden age. To his marauding followers, who are identified by their crosses and black robes, this is a call to arms to end religious tolerance and racial equality—a brutal doctrine they enforce by machine gun. And as this band of violent extremists sets its deadly sights on Earthseed, Acorn is plunged into a harrowing fight for its very survival. Taking its place alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Butler’s eerily prophetic novel offers a terrifying vision of our potential future, but also one of hope. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.

I tore through this one pretty quickly, compelled by the story. I was interested in the complex relationships between Lauren, her daughter, and her brother, and interested in the world building (or rather world-rebuilding) honestly as a model and thought exercise for survival and rebuilding and challenges to contend with in what I see as a possibly very similar descent in the real world. I appreciated the thoughts and questions on building community and cultivating resilience. But I also appreciated the new narrators interrupting Lauren's meditations, which are (intentionally) the work of a self interested philosopher. I was really interested in the people throughout the novel who kept insinuating that Lauren was manipulative and didn't actually care about people, or that if she did it was secondary to her purpose as cult leader and religion founder. Eg: Can you “shape” people and communities intentionally, for your own purposes, and yet also be a person who cares about others and wants a greater good? Questions of power, movements, demagogues. Lauren is a magnetic cult leader just like Jarret - the difference, supposedly, is the end goal and the collateral (or lack thereof) along the way.

It was of course a story in some ways brutal, in some ways beautiful, in some ways warm and others cold. Whether or not you agree with Lauren Olamina's religion, the duology ends with her goal accomplished, and after all the events of two books and several fictional decades, that conclusion feels satisfying. But with the losses along the way, it doesn't feel too perfect.

It's too bad this is the last parable book. It's such a unique concept and a really interesting philosophy.

Complex and rich, sad and magnificent, timely and intemporal this book doesn't really need my review.

This book has frightened me...it's frightened me in the same way “A Handmaid's Tale” once frightened me. It's not hard to imagine a societal breakdown such as the one portrayed in “Talents”...a breakdown where the disparity between rich and poor is so vast and the atrocities done in the name of “God” so great. The descriptions of company towns, reeducation camps, neoconservative religious political leaders...it just doesn't sound that farfetched. Butler knows how to spin a yarn in such a way as to keep me unsettled and almost despondant throughout the entire prose. I know Earthseed is supposed to be a comfort, but all I can see or feel is the desolation of the characters. As well as it was written, I was be glad to finish this and put it behind me. My emotions needed to settle down a bit.