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Kindred

Not the cover I’d use as Dana mainly wore pants

Dramatic and creative, Octavia Butler‘s Kindred pulled me in from the beginning. A post on Butler’s birthday on The Writer’s Almanac intrigued me. I’d never known of any African American sci fi writers. Science fiction isn’t a favorite of mine but I became curious.

Kindred is a time travel tale centered on Dana and her husband Kevin who get pulled out of 1976 to antebellum Maryland. At the beginning of the story, when Dana’s ancestor Rufus is in danger of drowning as a boy somehow Dana gets pulled into the past to save him for the first time. Imagine a black modern woman saving and eventually having to live on a plantation owned by her white ancestors. Dana’s permitted to work in the cookhouse and works teaching Rufus to read, but she’s not exempt from the horrors of slavery. The the story realizes all the potential for drama and insight that the premise promises.

The book isn’t heavy on the time travel and that’s to its credit. Dana and her Caucasian husband’s trips back in time allow readers to consider the injustice and cruelty of slavery afresh. The power of this novel is the characters and its veracity. I’d definitely read more of Butler’s work. I liked her style, her characters and the surprising ending, which emphasized that no one flees a culture of slavery unscathed.

Read Any Good Books Lately? (smkelly8.com)
Teaser Tuesday (xingu2.wordpress.com)
An Exclusive First Look at the Gorgeous New Covers to All of Octavia Butler’s Books [Octavia Butler] (io9.com)

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Posted by smkelly8 on July 24, 2012 in African American Lit, American Lit, contemporary, fiction

Tags: antebellum South, compelling, Kindred, Maryland, Octavia E. Butler, Science fiction, Slavery, time travel, Writer's Almanac

Teaser Tuesday

19 Jul

Rather late, but I’m in the mood to do this today.

Grab your current read.
Open to a random page.
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other Tuesday Teaser participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

From Octavia Butler‘s Kindred:

Carrie and Nigel named their thin, wrinkled, brown son, Jude. Nigel did a lot of strutting and happy babbling until Weylin told him to shut up and get back to work on the covered passageway he was supposed to be building to connect the house and the cookhouse.

From Anthony Powell‘s At Lady Molly’s (Dance to the Music of Time):

Since we have been undergraduates together my friendship with Quiggin, moving up and down at different seasons, could have been plotted like a temperature chart. Sometimes we seemed on fairly good terms, sometimes on fairly bad terms; never with any very concrete reason for these improvements and deteriorations.