Pretense reviewed Mind of My Mind by Octavia E. Butler
Review of 'Mind of My Mind' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
‘This pattern thing wasn’t part of his plan, then. I was an experiment going bad before his eyes.’
I’m reading the Patternist series in chronological order, so Mind of My Mind was the next up in the series for me. Here, we follow Mary, a young child of Doro’s from the previous book. Though Doro and Anyanwu (now solidly Emma) are present in this book, their roles are quite different. Instead, the focus is largely on Mary, and the ‘pattern’ of other telepathic people that she manages to gather together. Because of the pattern, the novel is split into many more different perspectives than the previous book. I had a harder time connecting with the characters, or even Mary for that matter, since we didn’t get to dive deep into the minds of any one with great precision, like in the first book. There, I really felt like Doro and …
‘This pattern thing wasn’t part of his plan, then. I was an experiment going bad before his eyes.’
I’m reading the Patternist series in chronological order, so Mind of My Mind was the next up in the series for me. Here, we follow Mary, a young child of Doro’s from the previous book. Though Doro and Anyanwu (now solidly Emma) are present in this book, their roles are quite different. Instead, the focus is largely on Mary, and the ‘pattern’ of other telepathic people that she manages to gather together. Because of the pattern, the novel is split into many more different perspectives than the previous book. I had a harder time connecting with the characters, or even Mary for that matter, since we didn’t get to dive deep into the minds of any one with great precision, like in the first book. There, I really felt like Doro and Anyanwu’s characters got more complex and compelling as you go through the book. Here, the characters take a step back to further the plot and worldbuilding that Butler is developing here.Don’t get me wrong – I love good worldbuilding, and the SFF elements that are developed in this book are a lot of fun. An intertwined network of telepaths – what could go wrong? There are a lot of fun tropes at play here, and probably many that were originated by Butler in this series and in her other works. Despite that, the pacing of the book was off; we spend a lot of time building up the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of Mary and her pattern, and the actual conflict is brought up briefly towards the end. There were a few moments of captivating description, but by and large, the style is rather simplistic.Perhaps it has to do with this being older in publication order than Wild Seed, but the writing style in the latter felt way more developed and engaging. The style here was more akin to reading a teenage girl’s diary of rants and third-person description of events. This has a certain distancing effect that made me care less about everything that happened, and even about Mary herself as a character. She’s very powerful, but like Doro, rather unlikeable. Unlike Doro’s perspectives though, Mary is given a first-person perspective. In any case, it did nothing to endear her to me as a character, and the other characters were barely present enough for me to form a convinced impression one way or the other.Neverheless, I have been ensnared by Butler’s seeds of worldbuilding and the potential consequences of the pattern and development of a group of telepaths, and this does touch base with a lot of themes I enjoy in SFF. That said, the characters left a lot to be desired, and I’m glad there doesn’t seem to be a huge link with this and the other volumes in the series (or at least the next one, Clay’s Ark). I’m definitely excited to see the hard sci-fi elements come into play in the later books.
