Parable of the Talents

He couldn’t keep my mother safe of course. No one could have done that. She had chosen her path long before they met. His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.

Gah! When this book was published (back when Bush was President) the alternate America it describes was meant to represent nearly unthinkable dystopian politics. But now with Trump as president the dystopia is just too close to home. I had a very difficult time reading this book because our protagonist Lauren suffers what seems to be the ultimate price for her beliefs: the destruction on Acorn, the disappearance of her daughter, the death of her husband, the near destruction of herself and her beliefs: she is enslaved with the collar and nearly killed. Nine months into captivity, thanks to a freak storm and a landslide, she does escape to spend the last half of her life hoping to find and be reunited with her daughter.

The story is told by her daughter as commentary on her mother’s journal entries and it turns out that daughter having discovered her mother as an adult can not entirely respect her mother’s choices and beliefs. The book ends twenty years on from Lauren’s year of enslavement, Lauren’s Earthseed is seemingly on the upswing, America has moved on from monotheist tyranny which was a relief to me. But Lauren’s adult daughter sees her Mother’s religion as a crackpot cult.

Its funny how this book seems to describe the beliefs and yearnings of a large fraction the current populace as the opposition to the (really-not-a-religion) Earthseed yet Elon along with many Trump-allied techno-libertarians also share the Earthseed belief in man’s destiny offworld.

This book manages to be more emotionally painful to read than Kindred.