4.0
Kindred
ByPublisher Description
NEW FOREWORD BY JANELLE MONÁE
Experience the time travel science fiction classic from the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo Awards.
A modern Black woman is pulled through time to face the horrors of slavery in this “Great American Novel” about racism, sexism, and white supremacy—then and now (The Atlantic).
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.
Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).
“Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.”
—N. K. Jemisin
Experience the time travel science fiction classic from the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo Awards.
A modern Black woman is pulled through time to face the horrors of slavery in this “Great American Novel” about racism, sexism, and white supremacy—then and now (The Atlantic).
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.
Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).
“Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.”
—N. K. Jemisin
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesKindred Reviews
4.0
“this is a literary masterpiece. incredible.”
“Wow this book was amazing and intense at the same time.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler follows Dana, a Black woman who starts to time travel back to the early 19th century to protect her ancestor, who happens to be a White plantation owner. Dana learns first hand what life was like for Black Americans, with all of its horrors and terror.
Yeah, this one was a punch in the gut for me. It was chillingly real and harsh and disgusting, but at the same time, so eye-opening. Every time I think I know what slavery is like, I find myself reading something new that makes me nauseous. Dana’s experiences are truly brutal. The prose and storytelling was absolutely brilliant.
I think the only minor critique I have is that the pacing wasn’t really working for me. It felt really quick at times, and very slow at others.
PLEASE READ THIS - Kindred is a masterpiece of creative writing.”
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