Kindred by Octavia Butler
“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).
Here it is….my very last book review of this year.
This was the 76th book I read in 2022, which kinda surprised me.
I TOTALLY thought I read closer to 100 this year!!
Gah….just gives me something to work towards in 2023 🙌
I have had this one hanging out on my shelf for a long while now…it was gifted to me by my Missouri friend Megan before we moved away a year and a half ago 😬
I knew I wanted to read more by Octavia Butler after I finished “Fledgling”….her writing was SO GOOD but OMG that story was NOT FOR ME.
You can read my review on it here: https://brainglitterwithdani.com/fledgling/
I was ready to give her a second chance….and WHEW. I am glad I did because again, her writing is SPECTACULAR.
This book was a DOOZY.
It was a great book but MAN…there was HEAVY stuff in those pages.
Ms. Butler did a phenomenal job of describing the experiences and emotions of Dana as she navigates ping ponging back and forth in time.
You feel the tense horror as she realizes what it is she is supposed to do when she is thrust back into the past.
You feel her fear of not knowing how long she will be gone or when she will be taken again.
Dana slowly comes to realize that what she knows and understands about the many dynamics and terrors of the realities of slavery are not a complete picture…and the truth is much worse in many cases.
In order to survive, her ancestors almost had to come to a point of acceptance at times, which Dana unbelievably feels herself evolving into in certain ways as the story goes on.
The dehumanization, abuse, and degradation Dana and the other enslaved people experience are extremely uncomfortable to read about…but unfortunately is the harsh reality of the travesties that fell upon many generations of Black people in our country.
For Dana, as a modern day Black woman, to literally experience exactly what her ancestors did–physically and emotionally–was completely jarring to her psyche.
And the fact that SHE has to keep coming to the rescue of her abusive ancestor Rufus over and over and over again just to ensure her family line continues as it is supposed to is SO INFURIATING to read about.
I can not even IMAGINE the inner turmoil one would go thru in a situation like that.
You will feel totally tense and disgusted and UNSETTLED the whole time you are reading…which I think is exactly what Ms. Butler was intending when she wrote this story.
The characters are complicated, with nothing as simple as it seems….Dana feels deep contempt for Rufus while at the same time feeling reluctant compassion…Stockholm syndrome on steroids is what it reminded me of.
Lots to think about, digest, and feel as you read this story.
This is one that lingers.
Definitely recommend it.
And I will definitely continue to read more of Octavia Butler’s work….she lives up to ALLLLL the hype I have heard about her over the years!
This book was recently made into a FX miniseries, which is streaming on Hulu, and I am going to watch it tonight as soon as I’m done typing this review.
I am super interested to see how it all plays out on screen even though I know it won’t be good as the book….true bookworms know the book is ALWAYS better. 😝