Seedfolks

Young adult literature is often instructive, with narratives crafted to guide still-growing individuals. Instructive narrative forms, including the allegory, the parable, and the fable, have existed in Western culture since antiquity, and modern writers and filmmakers often repurpose older stories and forms to create instructive tales suitable for modern contexts. Examples include Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix series, which both borrow from and repurpose Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” for a modern audience.

Inspired by folklore, Fleischman often incorporates or reinvents older stories and narrative forms in his writing. Seedfolks repurposes elements of many agricultural parables from the New Testament, most notably the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Mustard Seed, as well as the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel to create a story that guides the reader toward creating community. Though it breaks with the simple narrative structure of the traditional parable, Seedfolks retains the core elements of the genre. Like a parable, it features human characters whose story reveals a spiritual truth. In this case, the overarching story of the garden’s first year affirms the long-lasting and far-reaching benefits of community and inclusion. Also like the parable, the story uses symbolism to represent deeper ideas, with the garden representing the greater community and the characters standing in for the diversity and individuality from which a community must arise. The story is instructive and moral, though the ideal it promotes—of community and interconnectedness—is secular rather than religious.