Strong Female Reads book club discussion

Parable of the Sower

How is everyone finding this so far? I'm now over halfway through on the audiobook and loving it, really annoyed I haven't read any Octavia E. Butler stuff sooner!

How is everyone else doing with this? I just finished! There’s a sequel as well if like me you’re eager to stay in the same universe!

I started it yesterday and I feel it's going to be a quick read as I'm struggling to put it down! I really like Lauren as a character; she has agency and she's a definite Strong Female Lead, but unlike some super-human heroines she feels believable and even relatable.

I've read a few Octavia Butler books before - Kindred is one of my all-time favourites - but I put off reading this book because I knew there was a strong religious element and I wasn't really interested in reading that. I'm a Christian (though NOT of the fundamentalist / Westboro Baptist Church variety!!) and although I've read and enjoyed anti-Christian stories like His Dark Materials I have to be in the right mood for them.
To be honest though, it hasn't spoiled my enjoyment of the book at all.

Glad you’re enjoying it. I was raised Catholic... Irish background, and I’m quite fond of a lighthearted dig at religion but don’t feel like this has done that at all. I really like the Earthseed idea.

I'm really bad at reviewing books because I can never really get my thoughts together, but I finished reading Parable of the Talents (the second Earthseed book) last week and I really enjoyed both of them.

As I said before, I thought Lauren was a great main character. She was flawed and made mistakes but learned from them, and I think the book did a great job of showing the passion and charisma that led to her becoming a leader. It's a real contrast to some YA books I've read where the main characters are either brilliant and flawless and everyone loves them, or they're clumsy and awkward and somehow succeed anyway in an improbable way.
The book wasn't at all shy in handling huge topics like rape, incest and modern slavery, which I think is good, and I liked that it wasn't too graphic or played-up just for "interesting backstories".

Parable of the Talents is really clever as a book and I would DEFINITELY recommend everyone reads it, and quite soon after Sower so you don't forget things. Without giving too much away, it follows the rest of Lauren's story but at a distance and through a different lens, so you get a different perspective on her and what she did.
It was jarring at first because it felt like Butler was being critical of her own creation (I don't think you see that kind of honesty in fiction very often) but I actually really liked it in the end because it made all the characters feel so much more human.
Talents is also incredibly prescient - it was written in the late 90s but it features a religious extremist populist president who campaigns to "make America great again" (Butler actually uses that phrase!) which just felt way too close to home sometimes.