Akiva Reads

by Octavia E. Butler

I can't come up with a way to rate this one. All I can seem to say about Dawn is what it wasn't. I could hardly stand to read it towards the end as the consent... stuff... got worse and worse, but it was interesting and I did finish it. It was not incorrect, and not irrelevant, and not ill-conceived. I didn't like it. I don't think it was badly written. I don't not recommend it, but I don't recommend it either.

Ok, actually one thing I can say about it: Really Alien Aliens. Like, totally fucking fantastic aliens and alien culture and alien biology. Very few people are even decent at writing really alien cultures; Octavia Butler blows them all out of the solar system.

Most of what I'm struggling with is whether the ending was effective---which also depends on what was the point Butler was trying to make. (spoiler-cutting vague talk about the direction of the narrative that doesn't reference any specific plot points.) Lilith accepts things because she has no choice, and she tries to find a way to survive within them, and I'm not judging that at all---it's... real, human. But it's hard to reach the end without losing your grip on her struggle to justify things, and when you lose that you lose the ability to identify/empathize with her, and she sort of becomes a "statistic." And if she becomes a statistic, the point of the book goes from "what does it mean to be human" and "how do you survive a situation so completely out of your control" to "look what awful things I can come up with to do to my characters."