What a moment in time to read this book, which feels like one possible blueprint for a way for society to start over again, to live in community and in harmony with the land. Like an answer to the question "What if we could do things right?" This book is messier and more disjointed than the two previous novellas but in a way that feels authentic to the content. Because rebuilding community and recovering from a plague (and the oppressive grief that followed) could be nothing but messy and disjointed. Between the author's beautiful use of language and the clear connection to Octavia Butler's work, I found myself highlighting passage after passage and writing quotes down in a notebook.

If you are a leftist who still feels hope (or is looking to find hope) in these challenging times but doesn't want to gloss over the hard stuff, I highly recommend this trilogy. It got me thinking and feeling in new ways.

And here is a small selection of quotes I highlighted and thought a lot about:

"most people, at some point, they become aware that there's one true binary in this world. you are either mending or breaking the future. most of us are doing both at the same time because we aren't designed to hold one half of a contradiction."

"i didn't know what it felt like to be seen - you don't even really know what it is like to be alive until someone sees you and looks at you as both an object they want in a soul they need."

"There is no right time, there's just wasted time."

"Part of colonizer legacy is that we have forgotten how to think. How to ask questions. How to see ourselves and others with compassion. How to care for ourselves as part of the land. You have to think something is valuable to treat it with care."

"Now we sit together as creatures who have survived being hunted by the same predator. And the predator is not the body, the white body, the white man. The predator is the idea that we can somehow live our lives without being in relationship to the earth. And this predator hunts us from within, you know. It allows for this violent dehumanization. To get to the place where someone takes the time and uses their intelligence to create a method for killing others - not for food, not for honor, just for some sense of domination - that is always a tragedy."

"And it gave us a chance, it gives us a chance to practice something. I watched my parents have all the best ideas about how we can move forward, about how humans could be with each other, but we were always under one attack or another. There was always a distraction and something else to handle. They never got a chance to just see what was possible, how far we could grow."

I obviously don't want to spoil the end of this series so I won't say much about this book specifically. I got the first book in this series on a whim and I absolutely loved it. I devoured the first two books in a week and I longed for answers and the ending. Then this became available and I read the wrong thing in one sitting. This was absolutely the perfect ending. It was heart wrenching and dark and had some amazing moment of heart souring hope. Overall this may very well be the perfect series.

Perhaps I needed to read the first two books in this series, but I didn't get into t his much. There's a lot of homage to Octavia Butler, which is is terrific, but also in some ways like in Butler's Parable books, the characters and situations often feel more allegorical than concrete and real, and I ended up not really caring about anyone or what happened to them.

adrienne maree brown never disappoints! I came to ANCESTORS for the speculative fiction and found a world, deeply imagined yet so resonant with the one we're all living through now. I am here for the pandemic reads and hope (and deep work) for transformative social change.