Talents , like Sower , follows the diary of a young black woman, Lauren Olamina, who is struggling to rebuild her life after escaping from a gated middle-class community in the Los Angeles suburbs during a time of social collapse and rioting. We see her in Talents , though, at a distance, with her middle-aged daughter providing commentary between the diary excerpts. In Talents , the small agrarian community of her followers, Acorn, is destroyed by thugs masquerading as Christian fundamentalists, and Olamina is imprisoned under appallingly cruel conditions. Her infant daughter, Larkin, is taken away, and the two do not meet again for many years. Meanwhile, Olamina relentlessly pursues her vision.
Talents is fitted together with care and thought throughout.
Butler is a keen observer of personalities and of society, and it shows. Butler's narrative style is absorbing, layering on detail after detail of everyday life until the reader becomes convinced of the reality she depicts. As with Sower , I found her descriptions of the differences in individual personalities, and of just plain human cussedness, authentic. Olamina's daughter Larkin, for example, seems generally unmoved by the terrible hardships her mother has endured and her success in overcoming them. I hope so.