I’ve read two previous Octavia Butler books, and I didn’t like either of them, so I wasn’t too excited about starting the next #CannonBookClub book. But oh, happy day! Now I get it. I thought Kindred was gripping and intense and thoughtful and layered and wicked good.
For the first layer, it’s a time travel story. Dana is randomly pulled back in time to save a young boy who turns out to be her ancestor. She never knows when she’ll be called, or how she’ll get home. If that was all it was, it would still be a fascinating story.
But it’s so much more. Dana is a black woman, and her ancestor is the son of a brutal slaveowner. When she goes back in time, she goes to Rufus’s plantation. People are startled at her speech and her crazy habit of wearing pants, and assume she’s a runaway slave. So THERE’s a layer of complication.
And then, though not much time passes for Dana, years pass for Rufus and his family. So she watches this innocent little boy grow into a racist dickwad, following in his father’s footsteps. Should she save him? Is he worth it? If she doesn’t, does she cease to exist? More layers!
I feel like I’ve already said too much, so I’ll quit spoiling. I haven’t read anybody else’s reviews, because I didn’t want to be spoiled myself. Now I’m going to go read all of them! This is a complex, thought-provoking, harrowing book, and I’m so glad I gave Butler another chance.
Which other Butler books did you read? Some of her novels are so different from each other (very obvious genre pieces, for example), it’s always a surprise that they are all from the same author.
I read a vampire book of hers called the Fledgling, which had some seriously disturbing pedophilia stuff happening. (There’s a pretty big age gap in Kindred too, that gets even bigger as the book goes on. Huh.) And one called Imago that I don’t really remember, but I reread my CBR review of it and apparently all the characters were unlikeable. I think Kindred is the first one where I was actually rooting for the main character. Dana felt real and sympathetic to me.
If you have recommendations for non-creepy, likeable-protagonist Butler books, let me know!
I think Parable of the Sowers and Parable of the Talents are pretty approachable. I may be grading on a curve, though – the Xenogensis series was super weird to me with some interesting points. Apparently Imago was part of that series (I read that series and her Patternist series as a compendium so I have a hard time distinguishing the individual books in each series, and think the Patternist one was in chronological order rather than publishing order which was also an issue).