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juushikaTitle: Clay's Ark (Patternmaster Book 3)
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Published: New York: Open Road, 2012 (1984)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 180,490
Text Number: 531
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A family is abducted into an enclave of people infected by a powerful, virulent alien symbiont. The book tracks two timelines: the initial outbreak of the symbiont and the family's experience related from three points of view. The narratives constantly overlap, creating redundant plot and worldbuilding, and slowing the book's pacing. Butler's books often have a distinct push/pull, troubling dynamics and biology played against compelling, seductive interpersonal dynamics—but here, the pull is lacking: it's purely reproductive, and often promised or stated rather than felt or shown. As a result, this is my least favorite of the Patternist series so far (as well as my least favorite Butler novel). But mediocre Butler is still worth reading, and the alien symbiont has a vast destructive scale, on par with Lilith's Brood as a humanity-changing event. I suspect is also explores an important turning point in the Patternist series, and again I wish I were reading these books in publication order rather than internal chronology. I don't recommend Clay's Ark, but I'm not sorry to have read it and look forward to continuing the series.
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Published: New York: Open Road, 2012 (1984)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 200
Total Page Count: 180,490
Text Number: 531
Read Because: continuing the series, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A family is abducted into an enclave of people infected by a powerful, virulent alien symbiont. The book tracks two timelines: the initial outbreak of the symbiont and the family's experience related from three points of view. The narratives constantly overlap, creating redundant plot and worldbuilding, and slowing the book's pacing. Butler's books often have a distinct push/pull, troubling dynamics and biology played against compelling, seductive interpersonal dynamics—but here, the pull is lacking: it's purely reproductive, and often promised or stated rather than felt or shown. As a result, this is my least favorite of the Patternist series so far (as well as my least favorite Butler novel). But mediocre Butler is still worth reading, and the alien symbiont has a vast destructive scale, on par with Lilith's Brood as a humanity-changing event. I suspect is also explores an important turning point in the Patternist series, and again I wish I were reading these books in publication order rather than internal chronology. I don't recommend Clay's Ark, but I'm not sorry to have read it and look forward to continuing the series.
