Hey, Readers! Welcome back to our monthly dive into one of my favorite things – Books! This month we’re going back to the 1990s… and forwards into the 2030s with Parable of the Talents by one of my favorite authors! Octavia E. Butler unfortunately passed before she could finish this trilogy of books, though some of her notes and preliminary work on it now rests at The Huntington library in San Marino – it was to be called Parable of the Trickster and sounds amazing.
Still, we have Parable of the Talents and it, too, is amazing!
Written in the mid 1990s and published in 98, you’ll find this book eerily prophetic in ways I’ll touch on more later. But if you’re looking for some spring-time reading, let’s just get this out of the way right now… it’s a heavy book. There are depictions of slavery, suffering, abuse and religious fundamentalism that, while gripping, are downright scary. If any or all of that sounds like something you’re not in a headspace to read about? I understand. I get you. Honestly, it was a struggle for me to finish it again before writing this Spotlight because it goes to some fairly dark spaces.
Either way, if you be with me, grab a copy and a cup of your favorite beverage and let’s read together!
Book Stats
- Author: Octavia E. Butler.
Formats: Kindle, Hardcover, Paperback, and Audiobook.
Price: $12.34 for Kindle, $25.99 for Hardcover, $30.00 for Paperback, $31.65 for the Audiobook, or one Credit on Audible.
Length: 416 pages or 15 hours 26 minutes via Audible.
Narrator: Patricia R. Floyd, Peter Jay Fernandez, and Sisi Aisha Johnson.
Number of books in the series: Two, and unfortunately it will remain two.
Basic Premise
This book, being a sequel to Parable of the Sower catches us up with the life and times of Lauren Oya Olamina. When we first met Lauren, she lived in a walled off community outside Los Angeles in 2024 and was 15 years old. She had a condition called Hyperempathy, which caused her to feel any physical pain she saw inflicted on another; if her younger brother cut his finger and she saw it, she would feel it as though it were her own finger that was sliced. A tricky thing to live with in the world of the 2020s, with rampant crime, the climate crisis starting to kill people in earnest, corporations buying up land by the square mile and the poverty gap becoming so wide, if you’re not in debt to your employer for life? You’re getting off lightly. Packs of stray dogs roam outside the walls along with gangs and people so out of their mind on readily available drugs, they’ll do pretty much anything to anyone for any reason.
It’s not exactly a wonderful life.
Lauren’s gated community eventually falls to these outside forces and she’s forced to flee. She meets people on the road while headed north, including her future husband, Bankole. A much older man who, despite their large age difference, is a good match for Lauren.
Parable of the Talents picks up after a relatively peaceful period of time. Bankole’s family owns some land in Northern California and he, Lauren and a fair few people that traveled with them have set up shop here. They’ve built cabins, planted gardens, gathered and bought livestock and are learning, teaching and taking part in various trades to make life better for themselves. It’s a somewhat isolated existence but they do trade goods and services with other communities in the area. They hold a sort of church as well, based on the teachings of Lauren; Earthseed is a religion she has founded, or as she’d call it, a collection of truths she’s passing along. Its central premise is that, rather than an omnipotent sky-daddy, God is Change.
Change is the only constant thing in this universe and so it makes sense. Earthseed encompasses a lot of things and is, primarily, a tool for survival and enrichment of the human species, aiming towards a level of maturity that it does not yet have. It wants us to spread out towards the stars. Find new planets to survive on, while encouraging us to take care of what we have here on Earth as well. It is, in most ways, a wonderful concept. It thrives on challenge and most facets of it are debated over, discussed and re-worked as needs be during these church sessions. All aspects of it are open to challenge and that makes it all the stronger. Humans are at their best when they’re allowed to find the best solution to their problems and conclusions to their ideas due to rigorous scrutiny, after all.
Of course, Earthseed doesn’t sit well with everyone. Especially not the sitting president, Jarret, who is a radical, right-wing Christian fundamentalist who sees any other belief system as something to be eradicated. He rose to power based on sheer charisma, having no previous political experience and his tag line is that he wants to make America great again.
Now, you might read that paragraph and roll your eyes. I’m not making any of this up. Yes, you COULD remove the name Jarret, replace it with another name and it would sound like an extremely biased take on American politics circa 2016 onward. I know, I know. This is not lost on me. I swear, these are things that exist in the pages of this book and I am not, in any way, embellishing them. Make America Great Again are the exact words used.
At the risk of repeating myself… this book was published in 1998.
Jarret’s rhetoric has inspired armed militias to take the law into their own hands. A community to the north of Acorn (Lauren’s community.) was set ablaze by gun-wielding religious fundamentalists wearing crosses on their shirts. Most of the community was gunned down, but a few survived and are integrated into Acorn. Speaking of growing the community, Lauren and Bankole welcome a daughter into the world! Larkin.
Oh, also? Alaska tries to secede and Jarret starts a war over it, as you do. The issue is that with the climate crisis in full swing, Alaska has become pretty temperate and hospitable on its way toward becoming balmy, then downright tropical. It’s an ideal place to live… but it wants very little to do with mainland America at this time.
Eventually, though, Acorn is discovered by Jarret’s base of supporters and all inhabitants are captured and enslaved.
Will Earthseed triumph over this major setback? What happens to Larkin? Does Lauren survive? You know the drill. Read it to find out.
My Take
This is honestly a rough one.
Not because of any deficit in the writing; there’s none. Octavia E. Butler is one of my faves for a reason. The entire story is wonderfully told and, like so many of her works, is brutal in the telling. She pulls no punches and describes things in viscerally understandable words that are compelling and damaging all at once.
The elephant in the room needs to be fed so let’s get this out of the way: A lot of this stuff that I’m talking about is stuff we’re seeing in the real world right now. It hasn’t progressed to actual witch burnings yet and society is, mostly, held together for us… but how fragile are the shoelaces and bubblegum we’ve used to do so? Astronomical prices, corporations becoming bigger than ever before and utilizing this size to crush the little guy, debt as a fact of life, intolerance of the people who are different, global temperatures risen to a point of catastrophe and authoritarian figures mobilizing violent crowds?
Again… 1998, folks. Based on projections of where Ms. Butler saw life headed from her childhood in the 1950s.
I’d suggest this book be required reading in every high school ever but it would last… oh. 7.3 seconds before getting banned. (Reverse those numbers flanking the decimal point if you’re in some states, I’m sure.) And on some levels, I do get it. I try to be as open with you guys as possible when it comes to my take on the stuff I read and Spotlight. I read books for fun. It’s a pastime I genuinely enjoy and do my best to make time for, hence my reviews tend to err on the positive side. I don’t care who you are and what you’re reading but by its very nature, picking up a book and absorbing it, looking for yourself among its pages, looking at the perspectives of others with an open mind and heart… we haven’t yet managed to create anything else as a species that lets us do that as well as the humble book and I’ll happily die on that hill. Some books make us happy, sad, wistful, nostalgic, excited. Some books make us feel a little fearful and like there’s a little less hope in the world than we’d like and… well. This is one of the latter in many ways. Would I want to subject young, impressionable minds to that kind of emotional unrest?
Yeah. But that’s just me – your mileage may vary.
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