Her parents’ generation are doggedly waiting and praying for the good old days to return, but Lauren knows praying to the old gods won’t help – any good times which may lie ahead will have to be seized and built anew by those of her own generation. The idea of God as a sort of super-person in the sky who cares individually about every soul and patiently waits to hear and answer humanity’s prayers is patently false to her… and more importantly, of no real use in this world. Lauren, a young woman of passing vision and resolve, daughter of the neighborhood’s Baptist minister, has been observing the decline of society her whole life, and concluded at the tender age of 15 that the religion of her father has no place in this tempestuous new world. It’s Lauren’s philosophical ideas, not the plot, that captivated me. Blessed with a dream and a gift for oratory, Lauren leaves the smoking ruins of her home and sets forth with a gun, a few hundred dollars, two traveling companions, and little else but her own determination to survive.

Lauren Olamina is one of the relatively lucky ones-a member of a shrinking middle class, living in an armed, walled neighborhood in the outskirts of Los Angeles, drifting closer to poverty every year as the times grow leaner, the climate grows drier, and the thieves outside grow more desperate. While familiar institutions like police and fire departments and federal and state governments still exist, they are ineffectual, and violence and vigilante justice have become the law of the land in most places. Butler first sets the scene, in a grim near-future that’s all too easy to imagine- America’s (and perhaps the world’s-that is left purposely vague) economy and government have become moribund, leaving thousands unemployed, homeless and desperate. If any of it seems clichéd, bear in mind it was first published in 1993, before dystopia became trendy and the genre became so glutted. On its face, there’s nothing that extraordinary about the plot-it’s a classic dystopian/post-apocalyptic future story, in which a band of survivors travels a ruined country, fending off bandits and natural disasters, searching for a safe haven in which to build a secure new home. It’s clear that she has been pigeonholed into only reading audiobooks with black protagonists, and a small number of those, which I think is a gross under-appreciation of her talents. Hungry for more of her work, I looked her up. I hung on every sentence, every word, and was happy to be carried along at the story’s natural pace. Her voice is raw silk, and her pacing and inflections are perfection, adding layers of meaning to a single word of dialog. A few reviewers have complained that she’s too slow, but poetry is not improved by speeding it up, and Thigpen’s reading is just that-pure poetry.

While hers is plainly the voice of a mature woman and not a teenager, she perfectly channels Lauren’s “old soul” persona.

Parable of the sower second book