I lived in my grandmother’s four-bedroom house with fourteen other relatives and watched my extended family bear the brunt of poverty and racism throughout my childhood and adolescence. I had grown up in a poor/working-class family in rural Mississippi, where I spent years eating government cheese, red beans, and rice, and drinking powdered milk. I never encountered her in my coursework, as my required reading looked nothing like the books I found in my personal reading: I read The Last of the Mohicans, Catch-22, and The Catcher in the Rye and little there resonated with the world I knew. And the young Lauren of Parable of the Sower here blossoms into the full strength of her womanhood, complex and entirely credible.ĭon't miss the first book in the Parable series, Parable of the Sower!īy Jesmyn Ward I can’t remember when I first read Octavia Butler’s work. I don't have the solutions, so what I've done here is looked at the solutions that people tend to reach for when they're feeling troubled and confused.'Īnd yet, human life, oddly, thrives in this unforgettable novel. I originally intended that Parable of the Talents be a book about solutions.

Octavia Butler herself explained, ' Parable of the Sower was a book about problems. presidency, this is a book about a society whose very fabric has been torn asunder, and where the basic physical and emotional needs of people seem almost impossible to meet.Īs Ms. Against a background of a war-torn continent, and with a far-right religious crusader in the office of the U.S. It is told in the voice of Lauren Olamina's daughter-from whom she has been separated for most of the girl's life-with sections in the form of Lauren's journal.

Long awaited, Parable of the Talents is the continuation of the travails of Lauren Olamina, the heroine of 1994's Nebula-Prize finalist, bestselling Parable of the Sower.

Parable of the Talents celebrates the Butlerian themes of alienation and transcendence, violence and spirituality, slavery and freedom, separation and community, to astonishing effect, in the shockingly familiar, broken world of 2032.

Parable of the talents octavia butler