Great story, featuring excellent writing that has truly held up over the decades. Only a few of the ideas presented here seem dated or goofy (primarily the language used to address futuristic drugs). For whatever reason, I didn't immediately consider the potential differences between a post-apocalyptic book written by a woman of color and similar books I'd explored that were written by white men or women. Having a strong, black female youth as a narrator is refreshing, and the maximized potential for even more obvious and egregious examples of class war, racial tension, and misogyny as "civilization" breaks down is explored more comprehensively than in any other work of fiction I've read. Thus, the landscape described by Butler seems (sadly) infinitely more realistic. Looking forward to the next book in the series.