Book Review: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Book title: Parable of the Sower
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Genre: Dystopian fiction
Published: October 1, 1993
311 pages
My rating: 4.5/5

“Live! That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

Teenager Lauren Olamina lives with her family in one of the few safe neighborhoods on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Outside the walls of their defended enclave, chaos reigns and only the rich and powerful are safe. When their compound is destroyed in a fire and her family is killed, Lauren is forced out into the dangerous world with a handful of other refugees.

Parable of the Sower is Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian fiction set in the years 2024–2027. The American society has nearly collapsed due to climate change, water shortages, inflation, unemployment and housing crisis, and dangerous drugs. Newly elected president Donner promises to make United States strong again but might just set the country back a hundred years. Sound familiar?

A lot of people have been reading Octavia Butler’s dystopian fiction this year, and no wonder. First published in 1993, this book is even more timely now than at the time of its publication, and Butler’s predictions about the future are eerily accurate.

The story is told in a diary format with Lauren recording everything she sees and experiences. Like in Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Fairies I read earlier this year, the format means that the narration happens after the fact. The reader is kept at a distance from what little action the story has, which makes the stakes rather low. In addition, Parable of the Sower is a very introspective read, with Lauren mostly writing about her ideas for a new religion she calls Earthseed and her belief in God as Change. This gives the book a very slow pace.

If this was a more recent young adult dystopian novel, the main character would naturally lead a rebellion against the corrupted government. But as this book is for adults, Lauren, like any other normal teenager, obviously cannot do much, and therefore not much happens in the first half of the book. The story first feels like it’s starting around page 50, when Lauren voices out her desire to leave the safety of the community to look for a better life elsewhere. But she doesn’t actually leave until the catastrophe that destroys her community at the midpoint. The latter half of the book with Lauren and other refugees seeking out a better future is more interesting than the first half, although we meet a completely new cast of characters we never get to know very well—another drawback of the story told only from Lauren’s perspective.

Parable of the Sower is perfect for readers who enjoy slower-paced dystopian fiction with philosophical and theological musings, but I would recommend this for everyone just for how accurately it predicted the future. The accuracy of the predictions could have given this book five stars, but I found the philosophical musings quite boring and repetitive. Toward the end of the book, there was also an unnecessary romance between eighteen-year-old Lauren and a man older than her father. I found the age gap rather gross. Because of these reasons, I’m deducting half a star, and I’m giving this book four and half stars in total.