A review by bojangles
Adulthood Rites, by Octavia E. Butler
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Wow. Wow. Wow. What is there to say that hasn’t already been said about this trilogy!? It took me three or four tries to get through it. The first couple times I listened to it, I got nearly to the end only to realise that I had no real idea what had happened or what was happening. Butler loves to have her main characters walking across a vast landscape and encountering big groups of people whose way of life is either being threatened, or up for judgement in a literal or metaphorical referendum. (The referendum the Oankali are holding over the fate of human existence reminds me a lot of the decision the vampires had to make about the day-walkers in Fledgling.)
For whatever reason, the fate of humanity in this book was significantly more hopeful than in Dawn. Akin and his deeply painful isolation, and determination to fight for the survival of humanity in a new world reminds me a lot of the very Black struggle to fight for a more just world that each individual living Black activist and community organizer most likely will never get to live in, because it’s the work they’ve assigned themselves because they know it is the right thing to do. And it’s a truth that it’s the right thing to do regardless of how resisters respond. And it is painful and ugly and messy and violent, and perhaps it has to be all of those things, but we must do the work anyway.
For whatever reason, the fate of humanity in this book was significantly more hopeful than in Dawn. Akin and his deeply painful isolation, and determination to fight for the survival of humanity in a new world reminds me a lot of the very Black struggle to fight for a more just world that each individual living Black activist and community organizer most likely will never get to live in, because it’s the work they’ve assigned themselves because they know it is the right thing to do. And it’s a truth that it’s the right thing to do regardless of how resisters respond. And it is painful and ugly and messy and violent, and perhaps it has to be all of those things, but we must do the work anyway.