Parable of the Sower Characters

Here she is: Lauren Olamina, one of Octavia Butler's best-loved fictional characters. What makes her so beloved? You know, besides the fact that she's a rockin' Black female teenager in 2024-2027 w...

Bankole is one of a May-December romance right at the heart of Parable of the Sower.Yeah, this dude is Lauren's 57-year-old cuddle muffin.Bankole enters the story on August 27, 2027, pushing a sadd...

Lauren is totally the daughter of a preacher man: Reverend Olamina.We never learn the dude's first name in Parable of the Sower, but that doesn't mean he's not important. In fact, the book opens on...

Yeah, we'll be real: Lauren's brother Keith is a brat. As Lauren says, Keith doesn't care about much (2.11). He's kind of a foil to Lauren: she's passionate and idealistic, but he just likes to "do...

Zahra plays a big role in the novel, but at first, Lauren doesn't really know her that well. She's just one of Richard Moss' three wives—and according to Lauren, Zahra is the "youngest and pretti...

Prior to the destruction of Robledo, Harold "Harry" Balter is Joanne Garfield's boyfriend, despite the fact that they're—oops—cousins (4.28). Once Lauren's hometown is destroyed, he pairs up ro...

Travis and his family come into the story in a pretty spectacular way. The opportunists or "coyotes" who hang around water stations looking to take advantage of people go after him, Natividad, and...

Natividad is the mother of the mixed family whom Lauren helps at the water station. Her child is Dominic, a.k.a. Domingo, and her man is Travis. When she first teams up with Lauren, Natividad tells...

Spoiler alert!Only one of them will make it out alive…Okay, Allie and Jill Gilchrist are the sisters Lauren's group rescues in Chapter 19. They're caught in the rubble of their home after the ear...

A big gray enigma, that's what Grayson Mora is.Grayson, born in Sacramento (24.73), and his daughter Doe, age eight, encounter Lauren's group on the road north. Grayson is "a tall, thin, Black Lati...

The Earthseed family keeps on growin'.Emery and her daughter Tori are two people who come to Lauren's group while pretty much everyone is sleeping during a nearby gun battle. They're "the most raci...

Joanne Garfield is Lauren's BFF—Oh, wait. Scratch that second F.Joanne is Lauren's best friend in Robledo before all the big changes happen—before the Garfields move to Olivar, and before the n...

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the wicked stepmothers.Oh, except she's not wicked.But she is Lauren's stepmother. Cory's native language is Spanish (1.13), she plays piano (5.5), and she teaches the ki...

Meet Lauren's boyfriend, folks. Well, he's Lauren's boyfriend before Bankole, anyway. And you'd kind of hardly know Curtis was Lauren's boyfriend at all from the way she writes about him. She says...

Lauren's MotherWe never learn the name of Lauren's birth mother—it seems that maybe Lauren doesn't like to think much about her. We know she was from Texas (12.64), but we don't know much else. L...