Dawn I hope no one ever comes for Octavia Butler. She’s so good at exploring issues related to gender, our bodies, consent, sexuality, and our brains and demonstrating horror and disgust without getting didactic about it. A novel about significant and existentially nightmarish changes to our genes, coupled with a total helplessness to do anything about it except acquiesce is something else. In this novel, Lilith awakes in some kind of captivity. A frustrating wait as she gets used to her new situation reveals that […]

When I first read this book and series, I read them in chronological order. This time around I more or less read them in publication order, though I think this book came out before Clay’s Ark, and I just read that. Regardless, I do remember spending a lot of time and energy in my first reading of this book trying to piece together what is happening. This time around not only having read it and all the books before and again, I really enjoyed what […]

This is a re-read and still a four-star book for me. Something there is in Octavia Butler books where she invents a wild new world, plays around in it in the most dreary and upsetting ways, never makes me feel too out of sorts, and even includes a lot of uncomfortable sexuality in the books, and they still just remain a joy to read. Not a joy in like….joyful, but deeply satisfying and enjoyable. These four books that comprise the Patternmaster books can definitely be […]