from the 1994 New York Times Book Review.
Butler "tries to imagine a new social order at its moment of conception."
Set in SoCal in 2024, twenty years after this books publication, Butler depicts "a society that has continued to unravel from our own day but that nevertheless remains recognizable. The middle-income community where 15-year-old Lauren Oya Olamina and her family live has a high wall around it; the price that water peddlers charge to street people has gone up again; there's a new drug called pyro that prompts addicts to get their kicks by setting fires. But daily life by and large follows familiar grooves, and it takes an especially keen eye to see the great disaster looming.
"Lauren, the daughter of a Baptist minister, is a seer. She suffers from a condition called "hyper empathy" in which she experiences other people's pleasure and pain as her own; even her relatively sheltered childhood has taught her to expect more pain than pleasure. By inviting us to look over Lauren's shoulder as she writes the diary entries that constitute the text of the novel, Ms. Butler slyly implicates us in the terrible events that follow: the death of Lauren's father, the torching of her neighborhood and her flight north, accompanied by a band of survivors who at first huddle together for mutual protection and only gradually unite around Lauren's vision of a better world."
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