Dana, Kevin, Rufus, Alice, etc. In addition to imbuing Kindred with a fast-moving and surprising plot, Butler succeeds at showing and not telling the atrocities of slavery through Dana's travels backward and forward in time, in particular her forced journey to acclimate to plantation life in the nineteenth century.
Through detailing the pain Dana suffers and the pain she sees her fellow enslaved individuals suffer at the hands of white folk, Butler encourages us to consider the challenges of surviving in an unjust world, just like the one we live in now. Why is it that our ancestors, as well as a lot of us today, are so willing to look away from the evils of racism? How do we stay true to our values in a society that so often pits minorities against each other, gives power to those who disempowers others, etc.?
Kindred makes us think about these questions without offering simple answers, providing proof of its thoughtfulness and strength as a novel. Overall, a book I would recommend to anyone and everyone. I honestly feel ashamed at my younger self for not reading authors like Butler sooner and for buying into problematic portrayals of slavery, like Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. I am doing my best to make up for it now by reading more books about social justice, by donating to the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations fighting the good fight, and by having conversations about these topics, volunteering, etc.
As a companion to Kindred , I would recommend reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and giving to groups that fight mass incarceration, as that injustice serves in many ways as the slavery of our time. Thank you to Ms. Butler for creating art that allows us to see injustice and to fight it. View all 12 comments. Mar 07, Julie rated it liked it Shelves: nobody-talks-like-this , in-living-color , maryland , reading-road-trip , thats-show.
Butler's biography could just break your damn heart. Her father died when she was 10, she had no siblings, her family was poor.
From the recent bits and pieces I researched, as I started this novel, I gathered that her romantic life was either private or nonexistent. Was she gay? As far as I could tell, she had substantial medical issues and lived with her mother, and died, far too young, at 58, of a stroke. Butler's online photo gallery. And yet. This is so extraordinary to me, my closeted sci-fi self has always rejoiced, just knowing that Ms. Butler's work was still out there for me to explore.
In fact, while I was researching titles for this figurative road trip of mine, I set aside my devotion to one of my all-time favorite writers, Anne Tyler, to give Ms.
Conceptually: fantastic! A twenty-something Black woman, married to an older white man in the s, disappears from her new house in California and time travels to to a plantation near Baltimore, Maryland. The reader isn't given any more info than that. Dana, our time traveling protagonist, appears to be connected to the slave owners in Maryland, and, similar to Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife , you are asked merely to suspend your disbelief that this can happen.
Just one piece you need to buy into: Dana time travels and, unlike poor Henry from TTTW , she does not arrive naked at her next destination. What Ms. Butler imagined here is juicy and delicious. When her husband grabs on to her arm and travels with her on her a later journey, the plot thickens. What a crazy idea, to throw this couple and their modern ideology into the Southern cookpot. So much could happen here!! Not only that, the dialogue here is some of the worst I've ever encountered.
Nobody talks like this to each other, and certainly not two romantic partners. I did not experience one page of this read without thinking: this is a book. I'm reading a book. I never, not once, felt as though I had emerged into this world.
This novel lacked authentic dialogue, character development, and depth. I felt like I was in a world of cardboard cutouts for characters and poster boards for scenery. View all 71 comments. Jan 20, Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing Shelves: african-american-lit , race-issues , historical-fiction , fiction , sci-fi-fantasy.
Absolutely fantastic! At times I felt like I was watching a movie She demanded my attention- I even stood taller while soaking in our warm water pool.
Each time she is thrown back in time she has to grapple with the devastation-slavery-era - vs. Oh my - the children and messages in this book are priceless. The creative crafty storytelling, This was my first book by Octavia Butler What a beautiful passionate writer she was.
View all 14 comments. I remember the astonished fear I felt when I read Primo Levi in High-school and realized how easily one can go along with dehumanization in order to save his life. As much as we humans like hiding behind false truths, we're merely trying to go easy on ourselves and to maintain our breakable feeling of control. We don't control shit. From the moment I read Holocaust accounts, I've met a lot of people assuring me that these days wouldn't ever happen again because people would fight harder and long I remember the astonished fear I felt when I read Primo Levi in High-school and realized how easily one can go along with dehumanization in order to save his life.
From the moment I read Holocaust accounts, I've met a lot of people assuring me that these days wouldn't ever happen again because people would fight harder and longer. This fallacious argument first forgets that it already happened again , and secondly it dismisses way too quickly how readily people accept awful behaviors if they become the norm. We can hate ourselves for that, but I'm not sure what we're trying to achieve when we forget that.
There will always be people who fight, but they'll often be fewer than those who silently accept or participates in the dehumanization. Now how can we change that is the real question. Us, the children I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.
What follows is an unflinching and very important look at what slavery really was and how its mechanisms worked , without, for once thank you thank you , an ounce of romanticization, but rather a complex but unforgiving portrayal of what many books would sell out as a Good Master ugh.
This is what the world needs. I often mention my students in my reviews, but honestly, it's because I often feel that we ask more of children than we do of fucking adults. At ten, they're able to understand that their intend doesn't mean anything if they hurt someone : they still have to be held accountable. The world needs to hear that as white people, we might not intend to comfort and sustain white supremacy, yet every time we buy into some romanticized version of slavery, we do.
A slaver who falls in love with one of his slaves is still very much a monster in my book. So, what? The guy has feelings? He'll still buy and sell people as if they were furniture.
He'll still make them work, hurt them, for his sole gain. What Kindred shows the reader is that no matter how easily we could feel sorry for said slaver - as Dana sometimes does - it doesn't change a thing. It should never change a thing. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense. This novel is absolutely terrifying and it doesn't need any zombies to be : people are the monsters.
White people are, and the fact that it actually happened in history makes it even more chilling. More, if we look at History as a whole, slavery has stopped in the US such a short time ago. And if Kindred reminds us of something that we should have never forgotten, it's how easily we come to adapt to - or make the best of, how horrible that can sound - such an horrendous system.
In the end, we humans want to live. This ongoing thirst might make us able to do great things, but it also makes it harder for us to fight. When are we starting to translate - and promote - these important books rather than the last NA by Colleen Hoover? As the first science-fiction novel published by a black woman, and as a fucking amazing book that will linger in my mind for so long, because I'm neither able to forget these complex and fascinating characters nor the message they carry, I'd say the world should wake the fuck up and read this book.
View all 8 comments. Dec 18, Joe rated it it was amazing. Before Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad , there was Kindred , a grueling plunge into American slavery with a fantastic twist. Aspects of the narrative might be too agonizing for the tender at heart, but I was with it all the way, from first sentence to last.
View 1 comment. Feb 18, Christy rated it really liked it Shelves: four-stars , audio. She travels way back to the time when her great-great-grandparents were alive. This also happens to be a time of slavery. Each time she is thrown into the past, she has to learn how to live and survive in this time while staying true to herself. I love books about time travel.
One of my top favorite reads of all time The Time Travelers Wife has it. This was very different from that book, but I still love that aspect of the story.
Kindred is such an interesting book. I have never read a book quite like it before. Dana time-travels back whenever her ancestor is in trouble. It can be days later for her, but years have passed in the past.
It boggles the mind. She stole the show. Rufus is a character you loved to hate. Kindred is part historical fiction and part sci-fi. I listened to the audio book and thought the narrator did a fantastic job. This is a book I would definitely recommend. View all 28 comments. Kindred tells the story of Dana Franklin, a black woman who is suddenly whisked back in time from to pre-Civil War Maryland in This novel is a beautifully elegant analysis of a not-so-beautiful period in American history.
I enjoyed how this book didn't shy away from being brutally honest. It doesn't seek to obscure the cruelty of the time period. It doesn't ask for the approval of its readers. It forces you to examine. We all like to think that we wouldn't have participated in that atrocious behavior that has stained our history. But would we have? Dana's excursions may suggest otherwise. To discuss history is to remember it. To remember it is to prevent it from repeating itself.
Keeping the conversation alive is vital. I would recommend this book to everyone. I only docked half a star because I spotted one or two trivial inconsistencies. Otherwise, a marvelous classic and one I'm sorry I waited this long to pick up. This review and other reviews of mine can be found on Book Nest! View all 40 comments. May 02, Dolors rated it liked it Recommends it for: Sci-fi and history? It's possible.
Shelves: read-in Kindred is a hybrid novel, difficult to categorize. Partly science-fiction, partly historical novel, it addresses race, gender and class issues in the context of slavery but, and this is the complexity of this book, in two timelines, antebellum Maryland and modern California.
Butler, far from trying to make sense of time travel and how it suddenly affects the protagonist of the story, uses the sci-fi device to transport a free Afro-American woman to a colonial plantation near Baltimore to explor Kindred is a hybrid novel, difficult to categorize.
Butler, far from trying to make sense of time travel and how it suddenly affects the protagonist of the story, uses the sci-fi device to transport a free Afro-American woman to a colonial plantation near Baltimore to explore human resilience when confronted with the vexation, humiliation and manifold forms of abuse, physical and psychological, of treating human beings as property to be used, misused and trafficked with.
The artifice of time travel serves the purpose of making historical barbarity a tangible and constant threat and to better understand the huge amount of silent courage required of those oppressed to endure all sorts of inhuman punishments.
Progress has been made since the days of legal enslavement, of course, but is it enough? Books like this one remind us that we should never lose that silent courage, that will to survive in order to fight injustice and oppression, if only, to pay back the huge sacrifices that our ancestors made so that we could exist, so that we could be here, living a relatively comfortable life, now, today, and hopefully, a life that will be fairer when our children fight their own battles in the future.
View all 38 comments. Oct 16, Nadine X rated it liked it. I wanted to love this book. Here, Butler braids past to present. Imagining something else instead, like the Haitian Revolution spreading across the colonies, seems too subversive. This represents a vocal minority, but the trend is still worrisome, even if well-intentioned.
We need open-hearted, open-minded critique, not conservative authoritarianism masquerading as liberalism.
When I taught texts like Heart of Darkness, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Small Island, and Carmilla , there were, inevitably, uncomfortable moments: some students were angry at passages, while others failed entirely to understand the uproar.
This was good. It prompted open-ended conversations: why do you think this , and, always most importantly, do you have evidence to back up your claim? We came to a place of hopefully conquering prejudices by confronting rather than avoiding—but also by speaking, without condescension, to each other. How evil remains, regardless of who wins wars. We fail if we read only what comforts and confirms.
Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Entrepreneur and inventor Sarah E. Goode was one of the first African American women to receive a United States patent. David E. Kelley is an American television writer and producer known for such series as L.
Alex Haley was a writer whose works of historical fiction and reportage depicted generations of African American lives. Cummings was a 20th-century poet and novelist known for his innovations in style and structure. Edna St. Vincent Millay is best known as one of the most respected American poets of the 20th century.
She coined the popular phrase, "My candle burns at both ends. William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Eazy-E was a West Coast rapper and label co-founder who was part of the group N. Author Octavia E. Butler is known for blending science fiction with African American spiritualism.
Important Quotes Explained. Quick Quizzes Test your knowledge of Kindred with quizzes about every section, major characters, themes, symbols, and more. Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Further Study Go further in your study of Kindred with background information, movie adaptations, and links to the best resources around the web.
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