Kindred

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Average customer rating 4.9 (8 comments)

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Kindred is a great exploration of race, not just historically through Dana's visits to the pre-Civil War South, but through how those visits affect her and Kevin. While they realize the truth of the historical record of slavery, readers see how such behaviors continue into our present day and how the effects of slavery have lasted long before its official abolition.

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What Took Me So Long? All book lovers do this crazy thing. Because they love books and stories, they have a ton of books they haven’t gotten around to reading. I’ve had Kindred by Octavia E. Butler for ages, years. Not reading Kindred as soon as I bought it was a big mistake. It turns out I love this book. I mean I really love it. If you’re read time travel books and like them, very few can compete with Kindred, well The Devil’s Arithmetic is excellent. The Power of Kindred The book is gripping, emotional, and rooted in reality. Dana, an educated black woman married to a white man in 1976, is pulled back in time to 1815 Maryland. Rufus, her great great grandfather, is a slave owner and a child when she firsts meets him. When Dana learns Rufus is an ancestor, I immediately thought he would be a man who lived above the culture of his time, but as Dana is pulled back to Rufus, he’s behavior is typical of slave owners. I wanted him to change and become the man I imagined, but he didn’t. As the years pass, he becomes more and more like his father and those around him. I think the power of this story is the reality and harsh truth that culture and mores help shape us and few rise above their time. As I became more acquainted with life on the plantation, with the position of field slaves and house slaves, with the brutality of slave owners and slave overseers, I found myself experiencing life through Dana’s experiences. Her life on the plantation becomes reality, more so than 1976 because Dana spends little time in her present. The beauty of Butler’s style is that although I’m white, I could easily relate to Dana, and so when she travels back in time to 1815, her experience on the plantation becomes mine. It’s the kind of story that stays with you long after you close the book. For me, the power is in the story of those on the plantation and their limits. This isn’t Tara of Gone with the Wind seen through white eyes. It’s real. Not just the dangers, but the everyday life. The moments of hope mixed with the horrors that such a culture brings. Dana is limited in how she can respond, and yet, her relationship with Rufus gives her some freedoms she wouldn’t have had. Late in the book, a reader learns that her relationship with Rufus also colored and shaped the way the other slaves saw and judged her. The time travel and how it works is never explained, which worked for me. It just happened. Readers know it is Rufus who pulls her back. Each time he’s either near death or has gotten himself into deep trouble, and Dana saves him. While the people on the plantation age, Dana doesn’t. She might be home for hours or days before she is pulled back again, but time on the plantation moves forward until Rufus’ death. The Negatives Okay, I love this story so much, that I dismiss the negatives some people bring up, but here’s a list of some critiques. 1) Dana and racism: some critics point out that as a black woman, she would have experienced racism in 1976. I agree, she would have, but I was born and raised in and near Los Angeles. Even in 1976, an educated person in Los Angeles wouldn’t experience the “in-your-face” kind of racism found in this book. Mixed marriages might have been unusual in other parts of the US, but not in Southern California. From my experience growing up, I didn’t have a problem with Dana’s reactions to racism. 2) Dana didn’t do anything to change the time or the people. This critique surprises me. Would we really want someone going back in time and mucking around with history? Dana focused on Rufus and tried to influence him to become a better man. As it turns out her efforts were a lost cause. Kevin helped slaves escape to freedom. For me, these are two ordinary people who have to find a way to live in a hostile and “foreign” land. If they started spouting prophecies about the future or trying to invent future technology, who knows what would have happened to them and the future. 3) Some people complain they didn’t know Dana was black. The cover sort of gives it away without the author telling us on page one. Okay, I’m being a little snarky. I’m that way when someone criticizes Firefly too. Last Thoughts Go read the book!

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Octavia Butler is one of the greatest sci-fi/fantasy writers of our time and this book is one of her best. Like all great sci-fi, this book can be read on two levels and both are equally engaging. The first is the surface, narrative level. The trials and tribulations of Dana, an African-American woman living in the mid-70s, who suddenly finds herself being transported back to the 1800s to a slave plantation are riveting from the first page. I found myself staying up into the wee hours of the morning reading this because I just had to know what happened to Dana and the other characters. The second level is that of metaphor; it's a response to the more militant attitudes in the African-American community at the time this book was written. It wasn't uncommon to hear people condemning those who didn't try to escape slavery as weak and "house slaves" or slaves who had sexual relations (voluntarily, or as close as one could get to it as a slave) as traitors. Butler uses Dana's journeys into the past as a way to explore how the oppressive social systems of the time work on people's minds. Even someone like Dana, who grew up in the comparatively more free and liberated 60s and 70s can feel changes in herself, in spite of her best efforts to fight against it. The result is a much more compassionate view of slaves as complicated people with sometimes conflicting feelings and impulses trying to get by the best they can within a horribly oppressive social structure. Such a message could seem heavy handed coming from a lesser writer, but Butler never lets the message overwhelm the characters and the story. I highly recommend this book!

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It's been a long time since I stayed up reading a novel under the covers, but "Kindred" kept me up at night, both with its page-turning plot and its searing portrayal of slavery's brutality. Butler uses the device of involuntary time-travel to explore love, race, and the legacy of slavery, making us confront the ways black and white Americans are both scarred and knit together by this legacy. "Kindred" is both deep and readable. I highly recommend it.

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Kindred, by Octavia Butler, is a fascinating story with complicated relationships, an intriguing plot, and a view into the time of slavery that compels the reader to consider this time period and all of its atrocities and complexity in a fresh way. Well written, and perfect for a book club as there are endless questions and topics to explore in discussion.

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In school, reading seems to always be comprised of "have to read" and "want to read." I usually hate the required reading in high school, but Kindred was a very unexpected surprise. The writing itself is very good, and the concept wonderful. Combining time travel and slavery was unique and brilliant, and I will gladly reccomend this excellent find to all lovers of great literature.

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Part science-fiction, part historical novel, Octavia E. Butler has her heroine, an African American woman living in 1976, time-travel to antebellum Maryland. A first person's account of slavery from a 20th century viewpoint. Facinating, I couldn't put it down.

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Kindred shows us all how difficult it was to live in the antebellum south and how even more difficult it is to truly understand it from a slaves point of view. Octavia E. Butler takes us there.