Kindred by Octavia Butler

Kindred by Octavia Butler

Read by Kim Staunton

10 hours 55 minutes

Published 1979

Publisher's Summary:

Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she's been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother. 

My Thoughts: 

Kindred has been on my list of book that I really should read sooner rather than later for at least a decade. Clearly that list isn't doing what it's supposed to do. When one of my book club members suggested we read this one this summer, I decided time travel was as good a link to summer travel as any other kind. 

But Kindred is most decidedly not the light summer read I would usually pick for the summer. It's definitely going to be a tough read for my book club members, including some things we usually try to avoid in books. But it's an important book for a number of reasons. 

First of all there's this (from the Barnes and Noble website): "Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was considered one of the best science fiction writers of her generation. The Patternist series (including her first novel, Patternmaster) established her among the science fiction elite. But it was Kindred, a story of a black woman who travels back in time to the antebellum South that brought her mainstream success. For years the only African-American woman writing science fiction books, like Parable of the Sower, Butler encouraged others to follow in her path." Butler was the first science fiction writer to earn a MacArthur fellowship and the first black woman to win both Hugo and Nebula awards. It's always a great idea to read the books that broke new ground and led the way for so many others. 

Then, of course, there's the issue of slavery, decades before the Civil War. Even as we're reading about horrible beatings of slaves, especially run away slaves, rape of the female slaves by the masters, and the selling off of children and husbands, Butler continually emphasizes that the Weylins were much less severe than other slave owners. Again and again, Dana is thrown through time, forced to save the life of a white man who seems determined, more and more through the years, to kill himself and it's up to her to save him to save herself. 

Along the way Dana must learn how to balance the person she is in the present day with the person she must be in the antebellum South. When she inadvertently transports her white husband back with her once, they are forced to live the lie that he is her master and she his property. She becomes desperate to get him back to the present time, fearful that life in the South in the early 19th century will change the man she loves permanently. Through the years, and the abuse she endures, Dana begins to worry that she, too, will be changed in ways that will mark her for the rest of her life. The characters in this book are not caricatures; they are individuals, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, each with their own ways to survive. 

Kindred will certainly not be my last book by Butler. Although, I'm sorry to say, it may be the last I listen to as I felt the reading lacked the gravitas the book deserves.