Kindred
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4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NEW FOREWORD BY JANELLE MONÁE
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
“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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Octavia E. Butler’s thrilling science fiction tale will make you contemplate the legacy of American slavery in a powerful new way. Dana is a young Black woman living in Altadena, California, in 1976—until suddenly, she isn’t. Some powerful force transports Dana from her comfortable suburban married life to a plantation in 1815 Maryland, just in time to save a young white boy’s life. She’s soon shot back into the present, but Dana’s encounters with the brutal realities of the antebellum South continue. Butler does a brilliant job gripping the reader as her heroine’s firsthand experiences with slavery open her eyes to all the ways in which the institution’s horrors reverberate in the present. Kindred blends science fiction and historical fiction into something earthshaking and new.
Customer Reviews
See AllCaptivating, but left me hanging at the end
I loved this book! It contained so many vocabulary gems, historical references, and suspenseful moments that often prompted outbursts of support and disparagement for many of the characters. While engaging, the book left me hanging at the end as the final chapter concluded abruptly, a choice I’m assuming Ms. Butler intended, and transitioned to a prologue of events that I’m struggling to comprehend without a bridge.
So here I am with a mound of questions that I won’t disclose to avoid further spoiling the book, and cliffhanger discomfort that I have yet to assuage
within novel realms of social media. In sum, the novel is def worth the read and I guess it did its job if it left me wanting more in the end lol.
Simply amazing
This book has took control of me and brought me into its world, I couldn’t stop reading it as if it was a movie in front of me! Each chapter left me wondering and wanting more, definitely a book I would recommend! When I realized the book was written 47 years ago, it tripped me out more how much I related to the book. The series introduced me to the book but the book has made me not care much for the series. All in all I would say I definitely enjoyed this book.
Great read
I watched the tv adaptation of this book after the recommendation of a friend. It only has one season so far which I binged in a day and a half, and which left off on a total cliffhanger. When I learned that the show was based on the first few chapters of this book, I bought it immediately. I had to know what happened. The book did not disappoint at all. I couldn’t put it down and finished in 2 days. Highly recommend this read, very entertaining but also makes you think.