RC's Reviews > Parable of the Sower

This is a terrible, amateurish book. I honestly feel like I’m being gaslit by all the praise people fall over themselves to heap on it.

This book has almost no redeeming qualities. The writing is poor, YA level, marred by incessant, artless brutality. It’s a crude, poorly constructed, hyper-violent yet somehow profoundly boring and tedious book. The trite, vapid, fortune-cookie Earthseed pabulum is just cringey and embarrassing. I can’t understand why people say this is a great book. It’s not.

Some forms of brutality and horror are more artful than others. It’s very difficult sometimes to put your finger on why or how. Blood Meridian for example, is steeped in gore and brutality, but the saving grace seems to be that it was getting at the brutality involved in the “settling” of the “frontier.” The brutality served a thematic purpose; much as the brutality in Butler’s Kindred did, to drive home the horrors of slavery.

The brutality and gore in here didn’t seem to serve the same purpose, or have as much of a thematic role. Moreover, the reliance on gore and sheer shock value ended up numbing the senses, and, in my case, producing a sort of resentment: the brutality and the gore was so excessive, so crudely depicted, that at a certain point it seemed to border on sadism. If the book had been written by, say, McCarthy or Quentin Tarantino, I am 100% sure that there would be strenuous objections to the way violence is so repetitively depicted, especially rape.

But is the situation different because of Butler’s identity as a Black woman? I think the reading of all that brutality is different for most readers because of the author’s identity. But should it be? I’m not sure.