What a bleak and brilliant book to start 2020 with. This book contains enormous pain and fracturing, and it was sometimes hard to push through that, but its insight, its willingness to break its own molds, its willingness to hold several things at once (and the way it forces you to also do so) is, I think, worth it. It's left me unsettled and opened. ( )

This was the closest book I have found so far to what I am looking for in a dystopian novel. It was slow moving and a little confusing in format (I had to keep flipping back to previous chapters to keep track of how much time had passed between journal entries), but I liked that it was as believable and terrifying in its description of the collapse as Stephen King's The Stand, yet it never digressed into any sort of supernatural battle between good and evil like The Stand did. More action sequences and descriptions of the terrors of living on the road would have been good, but I certainly appreciated the fact that even in the collapse, humanity and a few good, kind people could still be found. All in all I did enjoy the book. ( )

This second book in the Earthseed duology is a sequel to Parable of the Sower, although I do believe it could be read as a stand-alone novel because it quickly summarizes the gist of the first book. In this installment, the protagonist of Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, a persuasive, charismatic leader, continues her quest to build a community founded on the principles of the new religion she created, Earthseed. The rise of this religious cult occurs in an apocalyptic future America in the grips of environmental collapse, lawlessness, and economic failure. Lauren’s community, Acorn, grows and thrives; she marries and has a baby girl. As the community thrives, though, the country continues to crumble as climate change forces people north in search of potable water and food.

While Laruen and her followers are realizing her vision of building a peaceful community in northern California, in 2032, America elects a president, Andrew Steele Jarret, a conservative preacher in the Christian America church, who aims to “make America great again”. Jarrett, whose followers have already been engaged in burning so-called witches and cultists, essentially enslaves the populace, forcibly separating children from their parents and placing them with others as slaves. In this initiative, Lauren’s daughter, Larkin (later known as Asha Vere), is taken from her.

This sequel is even darker than the original in its dystopian doom and gloom, although it also has an understory of a mother-daughter relationship, as it is told mostly through journals kept by Lauren and her daughter, who do not reconnect again until Asha’s adulthood. Olamina’s husband (Bankole) and brother (Mark) also weigh in. While the first book was told from Lauren’s perspective and focused on the developing the characters, this book is action-driven. Although I felt some sympathy for Asha because she had been taken, she is not a sympathetic character, and certainly does not like her mother, blaming her for chosing her religion over her daughter.

I was astonished by the prescient parallels between Jarrett – and his violent religious zealot followers – and Donald Trump – and his violent cultish followers who invaded Congress on January 6, 2021 (to me, would-be modern enslavers of women and people of color). The similarity was eerie, particularly given that this novel was written in 1998. Like the 2021 Proud Boys and other fringe lunatic groups Trump gathered in his fold, Jarrett’s followers target people of color and women, arm themselves in paramilitary fashion, and are tacitly supported and encouraged by Jarrett, who turns a blind eye to their lawlessness, who similarly tries to pretend he has nothing to do with it. In the end, though, I did not enjoy this sequel as much as the first book, perhaps because of the journal format.
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Good, but not as good as parable of the sower. That had a better story. ( )

good book, although I found the many bible and religious references kind of tiring... ( )