August 28, 2020
In continuing with Advantage Testing’s Tutor Spotlight series, we have asked our tutors to speak about their favorite books. In this way, you get to learn more about our wonderful tutors, and you may even feel inspired to use their recommendations for some of your own quarantine reading!
This month we have Julie Tessler, a tutor at Advantage Testing in New York. Julie is a graduate of Dartmouth College with a B.A. in Biology. After graduation, Julie spent nearly ten years as a financial executive recruiter, placing all levels of executives, particularly private equity and venture capital professionals. She left recruiting to follow her lifelong passion for the environment—she spent three years conducting international ecological research with a focus on the rainforests of northeastern Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, and the marine life of the South Pacific coral reefs.
This month, Julie recommends Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
“I was very young when I first read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Even back then I could see the many levels on which Octavia Butler had succeeded in creating her dystopia, but her main character, Lauren Oya Olamina, affected me in a way few characters do. To me, Olamina is the actual embodiment of the “strong female heroine” we seem to always want to read, but so rarely find. Olamina not only sees the reality of what is unfolding around her, she takes action. In Olamina, Butler crafted a singular person who possessed the ability to plan, survive, make pragmatic choices, and still stay true to her vision. Olamina remains kind, while all around her descends into chaos. Parable of the Sower and its sequel are widely recognized for their prescience, and they are eerily on-point today. Octavia Butler’s heroine, however, is living and arguably thriving in that out-of-control world, and makes Parable of the Sower so real.”