I’m a mix of Scandinavian, German, English, Irish, and South Dakotan:). Somehow my skin color turned out somewhere between peach, tan, and white, but I’m so much more than my skin color; so are you. I don’t want to be characterized by my skin color; neither do you. Yet those obsessed with race and skin color will do what Butler’s protagonist did: identify someone by their skin color first.
Butler’s following description tells us so much more. She was wiry and “all planes and angles.” That subsequent description is fantastic, and it tells us so much more about the human being. The character is malnourished, but with a strong and determined “hawk face.” Eventually we get to know these characters . . . but let’s start by looking deeper. As Morgan Freeman said, “I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.”
As authors, let’s stop describing our characters that way, too.
Parable of the Sower is one of the more depressing and hopeless books I’ve read in a while. As many anti-Christian books do, it capitalizes on a Christian theme or passage, and twist it into a non-Christian tale. In the story, our protagonist leads a group of survivors through a desolate, dangerous, and dystopian modern day California. The world is Godless, and the characters double down on living the same way, while justifying it. “We only kill people who threaten us.” “We only steal from other people.” “God is Change”…and we “try to shape God.” While there is some creativity, sharing people’s pain, a pyro drug that makes people want to start fires, Butler avoids much descriptive language, writing as desolate as the premise itself. Nonetheless, there were a a handful of interesting lines that were worth posting about. Long to short, I don’t recommend the book, unless you’re after a depressing, soulless, dystopian novel. Equally depressing is the number of people who rated it highly in GoodReads. You can see some of those in GoodReads. I guess I prefer hope and faith.
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