1. Patternmaster by Octavia Butler
Aug. 29th, 2007 08:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helens78 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
50books_pocHello! I'm Helens. I just signed up yesterday, snagged a book off my shelf, and read it over the course of last night and this morning. My personal goal is to read twenty new books (new to me, that is) for this challenge; I know a lot of them are going to be re-reads. I look forward to the challenge anyway, though, as I like to have read about 100 books a year (and many of those 100 books are always re-reads).
I discovered Octavia Butler in college, in a comparative lit class about science-fiction books. We read "Dawn", and though it would turn out not to be my favorite of Butler's books, I was inspired enough to go out and get more of them. I finished off the Xenogenesis series and then went for the Pattern cycle.
Patternmaster is the first book Butler published, but in series chronology, it's the last of the Pattern cycle. It opens on a world so unfamiliar that a first-time reader won't necessarily know what they're looking at, which I think is a pretty cool artistic decision. At only 202 pages, it has a narrowed focus, telling the story of the protagonist (Teray) and his struggle to come to adulthood in a hurry and find his place within the Pattern that connects all the Patternists in this world, but Butler's tight, clear writing style gives us a fantastic view of the world she's invented and never leaves us feeling confused. (This is a big deal for me; I often feel confused when writers invent worlds but don't ground me sufficiently enough in them for me to understand what's going on and what the "rules" are.)
I rated it 4.5 stars on LibraryThing, but only because the second (publication date) book in the series is one of my favorite books of all time (Mind of My Mind), possibly my favorite book, if I were held at gunpoint and asked to pick one. I've read MoMM several times in single sittings; it's that good. So there has to be room to go up from here, but not much! Patternmaster remains an excellent book with an engaging world and outstandingly smart, powerful, tough and brave protagonists. (And for those of you who aren't familiar with Butler's work, her protagonists are almost always Black or multiracial characters; many of her books have tall, Black, female protagonists; see the Xenogenesis series and the Parable series.)
I discovered Octavia Butler in college, in a comparative lit class about science-fiction books. We read "Dawn", and though it would turn out not to be my favorite of Butler's books, I was inspired enough to go out and get more of them. I finished off the Xenogenesis series and then went for the Pattern cycle.
Patternmaster is the first book Butler published, but in series chronology, it's the last of the Pattern cycle. It opens on a world so unfamiliar that a first-time reader won't necessarily know what they're looking at, which I think is a pretty cool artistic decision. At only 202 pages, it has a narrowed focus, telling the story of the protagonist (Teray) and his struggle to come to adulthood in a hurry and find his place within the Pattern that connects all the Patternists in this world, but Butler's tight, clear writing style gives us a fantastic view of the world she's invented and never leaves us feeling confused. (This is a big deal for me; I often feel confused when writers invent worlds but don't ground me sufficiently enough in them for me to understand what's going on and what the "rules" are.)
I rated it 4.5 stars on LibraryThing, but only because the second (publication date) book in the series is one of my favorite books of all time (Mind of My Mind), possibly my favorite book, if I were held at gunpoint and asked to pick one. I've read MoMM several times in single sittings; it's that good. So there has to be room to go up from here, but not much! Patternmaster remains an excellent book with an engaging world and outstandingly smart, powerful, tough and brave protagonists. (And for those of you who aren't familiar with Butler's work, her protagonists are almost always Black or multiracial characters; many of her books have tall, Black, female protagonists; see the Xenogenesis series and the Parable series.)
