Rating: 
Summary: The best work of an excellent author
Review: This would be an excellent place to begin reading Butler, because it nicely represents her work (realistic characters in difficult situations they must negotiate to survive), and because Butler has written a short, tense, fast-paced story here. You won't put it down. The third book in the series, Patternmaster, provides an excellent follow-up exploration of the book's premise as well.
Rating:
Summary: Butler is truly in a class by herself.
Review: Under the section about what other books were commonly purchased along with this one, the tittles are all Ms. Butler's cause she has her own style that makes people want to gobble her books like Doro does minds. This is quite possibly the best, no defenately the best first paragraph to a story ever written. Generally I might read the first page when I first buy a book then put it down. I could not stop and did not stop until Mary experienced being with Doro for the first time. This book is so real and vital. I'm finding out that is just how Ms. Butler rolls. Her endings are a little anticlamtic but nothing takes away from her stories. I hope she is not done with this series and I certainly hope she is not done with Xenagenisis.
Rating:
Summary: Keep it coming
Review: When I began reading this book I didn't know it would be the catalyst of the patternmaster series. Actually, after having read several Butler books and figuring out there were series, I would just read the books according to publications dates.Mind of My Mind is a good book that explores another realm of human development. This time instead of going into extraterrestrial realms, Butler keeps everything "grounded" so-to-speak. The characters, as always, are intertwined in some weird relationship scheme. (Is there something in her life that has her do these polygamistic type relationships?) Buy it, read it and expand your mind.
Rating:
Summary: divide of human speciation
Review: Will humans ever split into separate species? If so, what will be the cause and how will it happen? Octavia Butler addresses these questions in this fine novel. I was about to say that it was one of her best, but then her books usually divide themselves for me into the excellent and the truly outstanding, and there are more of the latter than the former. The quality of her fiction is better than any scifi writer I have ever read. Her characters, even inhuman mutants, are entirely believable as they embark on the strangest of journeys into the unknown. And it is so well imagined as to be completely believable. Usually, I have to fight to stop thinking, "OK this is someone just thinking this up." Butler puts you into these fantastic worlds. So the heroine of this novel enters into a struggle with Doro, the vampiric mind-entity that has bred humans with purpose for thousands of years. As the culmination of his efforts - a theme in sci fi from Frankenstein but since then never so freshly done as Butler has - she will either grow beyond him or be destroyed. Butler understands power so well, not so much from the point of view of those accustomed to wielding it as from those who must submit or die trying to escape it. Outstanding.
Rating:
Summary: divide of human speciation
Review: Will humans ever split into separate species? If so, what will be the cause and how will it happen? Octavia Butler addresses these questions in this fine novel. I was about to say that it was one of her best, but then her books usually divide themselves for me into the excellent and the truly outstanding, and there are more of the latter than the former. The quality of her fiction is better than any scifi writer I have ever read. Her characters, even inhuman mutants, are entirely believable as they embark on the strangest of journeys into the unknown. And it is so well imagined as to be completely believable. Usually, I have to fight to stop thinking, "OK this is someone just thinking this up." Butler puts you into these fantastic worlds. So the heroine of this novel enters into a struggle with Doro, the vampiric mind-entity that has bred humans with purpose for thousands of years. As the culmination of his efforts - a theme in sci fi from Frankenstein but since then never so freshly done as Butler has - she will either grow beyond him or be destroyed. Butler understands power so well, not so much from the point of view of those accustomed to wielding it as from those who must submit or die trying to escape it. Outstanding.
| 
