wow! everyone read this duology right now! Octavia E Butler is an unmatched talent. she was able to make me invested deeply in characters in a scifi setting (kindred) and now a dystopian in this duology when I've had trouble connecting to characters in these genres before. the fact that this was written in the 90s is, at first, surprising because of how accurate it is to the world we're living in right now but then sad because we've always been heading here. I did find some kind of comfort and power in all of that, though.