It's mostly Hoopla's fault but this was so hard to read! The Hoopla ebook is super low-quality images, combine with the font and it was a big old headache

I loved the original Parable, so when I learned of a graphic novel edition AND it fit the Read Harder category "a book from the Ignyte awards shortlist/longlist/winner list," I pounced. Interestingly, despite having been quite impressed by the original, I clearly forgot many of the details, so this version served as a bit of a refresher in graphic color, no-punches-pulled. It remains a stunningly prescient and devastatingly, violently bleak peek into a future not at all difficult to imagine. I wouldn't recommend this as merely a standalone, but rather as an enhancement to Butler's original work. ( )

Thank you to Octavia E. Butler (author), Damian Duffy (illustrator), ABRAMS, AbramsComicsArt, and NetGalley for allowing me the extreme pleasure of access to an advanced reader copy of “Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation: A Graphic Novel Adaptation” for an honest review.

This graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower was quite a surprise when I opened it. I've never recieved an ARC that was in such a rough draft format as this one arrived, so I'm going to do my best to cover this as openly and honestly as I can (while adding some notes of supposition given that there are five months to publication and it will be shored up by then, likely).

I deeply love that Lauren's narrative of this story remains her journal entries and that the journal entries are on every page, and every piece of narration is backgrounded my the image of it being written on lined paper (though I'm deeply questioning the few sheets that were three-hole punched?), as it kept you in the frame of mine it was written down and being told in that writing no matter what you saw in the comic boxes and dialogue bubbles format.

The art on the front cover, which stormed into my heart and demanded I request this adaption, is the only piece of art in the whole graphic novel that is complete. Everything between that gorgeous front cover and the end is serious of very rough sketches, all of which are in black and white. Several faces all still bear the lines of their symmetry, and most things don't have much background. This made it very hard to distinguish characters from each other and if I hadn't read Parable of the Sower in print two weeks earlier, I don't think I would have been able to even guess who they were.

I was very moved by getting to see the big groups together. It's easy to blend the idea of that many into a lump in your head, but seeing just how many people the group collected, and how many were settling at the end brought that even more home to me than reading the novel did.

Star rating for current art, but very likely to become a 4/5 once completed. No complaints aside from not knowing how to judge the art scale yet. ( )

Parable of the Sower: Graphic Novel
by Octavia E. Butler,
adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings

This is a tricky one to review. On the one hand, there is the stellar story behind this adaption. Butler was a master of the field, weaving powerful prose with profound ideas to create something transcendent, at times.
The Parable of the Sower novel is deep, and compelling, and important.

It is a story of humanity in danger, of faith and creed and hope. It is about race and love and humanity. It is a story worth reading, for anyone.

The idea of a graphic novel adaptation is a good one. I like graphic novels. It can be tricky, though, to adapt books to visual form (just like to movies) because you can't do everything. You have to balance the words and the pictures, so some words get left out. Obviously, it can work, as the comics creators behind this one created a wonderful award-winning adaptation of Kindred.

But judging that success is wholly dependent upon the art, and the art in this eARC is not finished. I assume so, anyway, because these are sketches, The faces aren't drawn at all in some panels, with the guidelines there to show where eyes, mouth etc. go. Some characters are fully drawn in, but many are barely ghosts. There is no coloring at all.

So I can't judge the art. I'm sure it will be fine when it's done, but it's not done, so I can only judge the verbal adaptation: the cuts and changes made to fit a novel to a graphic format.

And that is all pretty smooth. It works to focus on the dialog, mostly. It can be hard in some scenes, without the accompanying art, to know who is talking to whom. The action can be hard to follow as well.

But the characters come through. The narrative beats hit, and the story works, which is to be expected, since this is Octavia Butler's story.

I just wish I could see how it works as a graphic novel. ( )

There is always a risk with adaptations that they won't do the original justice. This mesmerising graphic adaptation did not disappoint, taking an already powerful story, and adding to it. This is a story of an apocalypse - a very human one - and the images very strongly evoke the drought, fire, and other disasters at a very personal level. ( )