Daniel Everett was a missionary linguist with SIL—the Summer Institute of Linguistics—who went to the Piraha people in Amazonian Brazil and studied their language and culture for 20 or more years..

Everything is now…this idea is at the heart of this imaginative story. Contemporary Earth and the mythology of the (real) Dogon tribe of Mali seed the world of Swazembi…

…the characters and their interactions and complications seem so much like they might in real life, which is to say messy and somewhat dysfunctional yet redeeming in a quiet way.

The best speculative, like Atwood, take a modern trend or problem and spin it out to an extreme “solution” that serves as a social commentary enlightening readers about the absurdity of how we have acclimated to the seeds of absurdity…

Woven through Parable of the Sower is a hopeful thread that something better is possible and out there if we are brave enough, crafty enough, and compassionate enough to follow its tug…