Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

** spoiler alert ** If I could describe this book in one word, it would be: Underwhelming. This was the first Octavia E. Butler book I read, and after reading all the great reviews about her, I was expecting a lot more.

"Dawn" brings a lot of interesting ideas to the table. Hierarchy, humanity's tendencies toward good or evil, captivity under benevolent rulers... and.... inter-species alien rape. Erm... why not? But none of the meaning or commentary behind this book adds up to anything because I just didn't give a crap. All of the characters were one-dimensional and uninteresting. The story and the characters both just pad along with no real pull. I only kept reading because I bought the book and I wanted to figure out where the author was going with this. But by the end it feels like she was going nowhere.

I don't even know who the main character Lilith is as a character. She was just kind of... there. Like all the other characters. None of the characters, not even the aliens, had a unique voice. So by the time the inter-species alien rape came in, I was already too jaded from the experience to have a reaction. (And speaking of which, what was Ms. Butler going for with the alien rape? If I actually cared about anything in this book, or if it was executed with more finesse, I would have just found it disturbing).

When the humans start getting physically aggressive and kill the main character's love interest, I felt nothing. That whole romance subplot was really half-arsed. It was basically just "These two characters are having a threesome with an alien... and that's it".

This book had a lot of potential. Again, Octavia E. Butler had a lot of good ideas but none of them paid off. I've noticed this is a problem with a lot of sci-fi writers. An interesting setting and world-building are not enough to create a solid book. None of that matters if you have zero characterization and zero emotional depth. I really wanted to like this book, but in the end I was left feeling empty.