Earthseed: The Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

This is the second book in the Earthseed series. Olamina and her Earthseed group have set up their community and are enjoying its fruit but soon her life changes again when her brother shows up who thinks she's a heathen and needs to repent her ways. Her brother leaves and soon after their community is run out by fundamentalist Christian terrorists and her community is forced into slavery and their children are taken away to be raised by "good" Christian families.

It's an awful experience to read about. The trauma and violence inflicted upon Olamina and her group is devastating after we have gotten to know so much about each and every one. Her husband is murdered and her daughter is taken away. After she escapes she searches for her but she also decides she needs to set up her religious movement differently.

The book focuses on her daughter all grown up and reading through her mother's old journals and Earthseed movement writings. Her daughter does not have a lot of sympathy for her mother and it's devastating to see it. Things do not always turn out for the best and our relationships with family and friends are not always what we need them to be or expect them to be. They're fraught with all the drama and hurt and disloyalty we can imagine.

These books were written in the 90s and it's an eerie reminder of how things truly never change in the world. Her assessments of current politics are spot on. If I didn't know better I'd assume she had written this series for present-day.

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” 

“Beware:
Ignorance 
Protects itself.
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.” 

“I found that I couldn't muster any belief in a literal heaven or hell, anyway. I thought the best we could all do was to look after one another and clean up the various hells we've made right here on earth.”