Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler
This is the second book I've read by Octavia Butler, and man that woman knew how to tell a story! If I could choose a deceased author to sit down for coffee with, she would be at the very top of the list.
I was actually looking for the second book in her Parable series, but the bookstore I visited didn't have it. This one caught my attention; I didn't know it was the second in the series until I was talking to my bestie about it after I started reading. But it's a prequel, so I kept reading.
What amazed me about this book was its ability to endear the reader to abhorrent characters. The two main characters are protagonists with very dark tendencies. Doro is an ancient being engaging in eugenics. He has a cavalier mindset about lives of those around him. Some of the women in his life challenge his callousness, pointing out his lack of conscience. He doesn't seem to mind, and they're incapable of not loving him anyway. Everyone in this book loves Doro, despite nearly everyone seeing his evil. The more I knew about him, the more disdain I held for him. But, especially in the beginning, it was difficult to despise him. The notion of eugenics was set out very early, and still, for a while there was part of me that rooted for Doro. I think some of that had to do with reverence everyone showed him. It was like I was under the same compulsion they were, for a time. Butler almost writes the reader into the story.
It was similar for the other protagonist, Mary. We meet her as a very small child. She's abused, and Doro finds convinces someone he knows to watch over her as she grows up. He does this because he knows her importance, not out of kindness. We jump to her teenage years, and she's a tough, spunky kid. She's angry and pained. Eventually, she realizes her purpose in Doro's plan and takes to it quite well; too well. I won't spoil the story completely, but Mary begins to engage in her own caste system and loses her sense of humanity towards those who aren't like her. It's called out, in very direct terms, by the woman who oversaw her upbringing. And from that point forward, I had to remind myself repeatedly that Mary's goals were altruistic only in a specific sense. If you focused on the right angle, you could see her goals as justified. There's a similar sense of group influence, where my opinion of Mary is affected by the other characters who only see her in a certain light. But her ambitions reach far beyond that angle, stretching into deeply unethical territory.
I think this ambiguity was intentional, and Butler wrote it stunningly. It made me think critically about the impact of perspective on our understanding of the people around us. I'm very curious to see how the rest of the series plays out, and how the themes evolve.