Melody's Reviews > Parable of the Sower

This book was not for me. I wish I had read some of the reviews before I started. I have never hated a book more in my life. I wanted to quit halfway through it, but after realizing it's meant to be some kind of neo-slave narrative I tried to give it a chance to see if the story became just 1% less bleak once the action picked up. I hate this world that Butler has created and I hate that I read 299 pages of misery porn before realizing that it was exactly that and nothing more: misery porn.

I wanted to kill myself just reading about these character's lives. It's beyond depressing! "Thieves, rapists, cannibals" and more are literally on every page. EVERY. PAGE. It is non-stop horror and darkness. The absolute worst kind of society America could become with no end in sight and no hope for anyone. Even the rich people can't really live in peace and have to abandon ship sometimes. This book is ABYSMAL. If you have any kind of mental illness, don't worry - this book will absolutely trigger you with it's senseless violence, fear and terror! That on top of centering the book around an unlikeable, annoying heroine is what made this an almost impossible read. I don't know why I slogged through this at all now.

The sadness, despair and awfulness only takes a break for the occasional awkward sex scene and for our heroine to get on her pedestal and start preaching to everyone about how she knows what's best. I get what Butler was trying to do - create a modern world with horror that is equal in the horror of the slave days. Except even in the slave days there was the very tangible hope of FREEDOM. In this book THERE IS NO FREEDOM. IT'S ALL AN ILLUSION! It's like the ending of Battlestar Galactica. You get to the last season and discover (after you were made to believe there's a paradise for soooo longgggg) that there is no Earth and everything leading up to this point was futile. The only teeny tiny glimmer of hope in this entire book is that MAYBE the characters will succeed in going North. But that's it. They don't even have a plan when they get north. They don't know how they're going to live, where to get money, nothing. The only thing sustaining the audience is that MAYBE once they get to where they're going MAYBE things will get better. A huge open-ended "maybe" is all the characters have and all you have too, the reader.

Oh and there's sympathy. Except our heroine really isn't that sympathetic. She's more irritable and obnoxious than anything. She is not someone you want to root for, she's someone you want to STFU (like most know-it-all teenagers. I know, I used to be one). She doesn't even cry when heroes/heroines are supposed to cry. She doesn't even break down from all the destruction and hopelessness around her literally every single day of her life from every single direction possible. She's the quintessential Strong Black Woman trope and it's fucking overkill, honestly. You'd think this mystical power she got would make her more like a human being than a robot survivalist.

I reached a point with about 25 more pages to go where I had no more sympathy to extend. I was tapped out. I no longer cared about any of the characters because literally all of their lives are filled with death and pain. Why care when all they've known is despair and all they will ever know is despair? I started to abhor the parts where new characters came in cause I knew eventually we were going to get their sob story and it was going to be more grim and horrible than the last. Butler crams every imaginable horror/crime/painful death in this book and just piles it on thicker with every new character. I reached a point where I just couldn't stand it anymore. I was skimming whole paragraphs trying to figure out when does it end.

Well, it doesn't. After taking 100 pages to set up the plot she spends another 100 pages bringing in all these secondary characters. And for what? To beat us over the head with slavery metaphors and corny "new age underground railroad" lines and anti-capitalism and speculative fiction about how all of humanity will eventually go to shit, so you better get ready.

Man, don't read this book. I admit that my own feelings about religion and anti-heroes made me bias against this book in one way. But you're only going to feel like shit once you get to the end. I had to watch cartoons as a palette cleanser to get this shock value misery and death parade out of my head. It's too much. Everything about this book is too much. I can't recommend it. Love some of Butler's other work, but I'm never touching any of these Earthseed books ever again.