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Chapter 24-End

  At the end of the book, there was a very slight plot twist: all of Bankole’s family members were dead, and all infrastructure was burnt. I was expecting Bankole to grieve a lot, but I guess he didn’t talk to them or see them much, and also the main characters in this book are too tough to grieve. It seemed like most of the characters generally didn’t care and wanted to keep going North, but it seemed like some were somewhat appreciative of the legally owned land. The main event in the book seemed like the gunfight. I feel like it was the first real conflict that they have had, because a semi-main character died and it showed that people in the group were trustworthy. There was one thing that irritated me during the gunfight: the fact that Lauren thinks she’s the most capable shooter. Yes, she has had the most experience, but she gets incapacitated every time she hits someone, and I can’t imagine it’s that hard to shoot a gun, so she should just give it to someone that isn’t a sha...
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Chapters 20-23

  I think these past few chapters weren’t too exciting, the group was mostly just walking along, trying to get further North. The more I keep reading this book, the more I expect somebody in the group to backstab the rest of the members, because they just keep inviting random people they meet. It seems like everyone they meet magically happens to be trustworthy and not too greedy, because they have had no major conflicts within the group. However, while I do think that someone will eventually become a traitor, I don’t think that Emery and Tori will be the ones, but maybe the Moras will. I was also very surprised about Lauren and Bankole’s relationship. I picture Bankole as a very very old man (like 40s-50s), so when Lauren started talking about alone time with him, I was really surprised, because that must be borderline pedophilia. It made me feel weirder that Lauren was the one who was more okay with the relationship, while Bankole seemed to be somewhat uncomfortable when Lauren s...
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Chapters 17-19

  There are a lot of interesting events in chapters 17-19, most notably Lauren’s “religion” Earthseed gaining more traction, but there were other things that I was focused on. The main thing that I noticed during these chapters was how most of the time, the world just seems like a place with a lot of crime but still some sort of unspoken rule that if you’re not crazy, act normal, sometimes help people out, but mostly mind your own business. I was surprised at how some of the people seemed so vulnerable to attacks - for example, the old men who fell during the Earthquake or the Douglas couple. I feel like with a baby, rare food, and nice supplies, they should’ve had a hard time defending themselves. The old men hardly even got defensive when Lauren motioned to help them up. It’s starting to make this book seem somewhat cliche: I feel like in real life, everyone in the neighborhood would have died, and if Lauren tried to let anyone join their group, they probably would have been back...
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Chapters 14-16

  Chapters 14-16 have been pretty crazy. The entire town burned and everyone was separated. Luckily for Lauren, she found Zahra and Harry, two people that lived in the neighborhood. I thought that it was really weird how everyone walks on the highways. People with cars could just run everyone over, and surely there were long stretches where nobody walked where someone could be murdered. But by Lauren’s description of it, there were so many people walking, and many didn’t have the common sense to show any form of defense and hide valuables. I was also getting annoyed by Harry - he would definitely have died by trusting people too much, and I was surprised that he was arguing back. Everyone in a society like that should be guilty until proven innocent. But that does raise the question: how would you find the right people to trust?
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Chapters 9-13

  I know I said it in the last blog post, but something bad is going to happen. Throughout chapters 9-13, Keith left the neighborhood a few more times, learned how to make money and found a place to live and friends outside of the walled town, and died. Additionally, Laurens father died, people moved to Olivar (a safer company city), and the neighborhood had houses set on fire and was robbed multiple times. Clearly, the thieves are becoming smarter and learning how to cause a lot of damage, the town’s population is dwindling, and now a crucial leader has been lost, so surely in the next few chapters, the town will collapse.
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Chapters 5-8

Everything we’ve read so far (chapters 1-8) have clearly been leading up to something terrible. Thieves come in, Lauren makes her emergency kit and becomes more wary of inevitable collapse, and now Keith gave up a key to the gate. It reminds me of apocalypse movies when the main character is hearing about a crazy disease spreading somewhere far away, and it seems like the next day the disease will be in the main character’s town. It also seems like some of the verse hints to the future - for example, one said “consider the consequences of your behavior”, and then Keith lost the key and Lauren’s dad reprimanded him. This makes me wonder what “a tree cannot grow in its parents’ shadows” means. Do you think Lauren will get separated from her family?
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Chapters 1-4

  The first four chapters in Parable of the Sower give us a sense of the setting and characters by describing a few events through Lauren’s eyes. She also suffers from hyperempathy, which makes things interesting in the dystopia they live in, where unrest has made it dangerous to travel unarmed in unprotected areas. Luckily, Lauren lives in a walled neighborhood, which is generally safe from crazy people. Additionally, most people are religious and make dangerous trips to church, so religion will obviously be a major theme in this book. At the start of every chapter, we see “verses”, which talk a lot about change and peoples’ relationships to God. The walled community that Lauren lives in does not experience that much change, so maybe something bad will happen and some of Laurens’ neighbors will become a “victim of God” and others will become a “shaper of God”.
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