Parable of the Sower

  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?

  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.

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?

  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”.