Review: Kindred by Octavia Butler

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“I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. ‘The ease seemed so frightening.’ I said. ‘Now I see why.’
‘What?’
‘The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

Release Date: June 1979

Genre(s): Adult fiction, historical fiction, SFF

Publisher: Beacon Press

Pages: 287

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Synopsis

Kindred follows Dana, a 26-year-old African American woman living in California in 1976. She is suddenly transported to antebellum Maryland where, after saving a young boy’s life, has her own life threatened before returning to the present. After being transported to the same young boy multiple times, she realizes the challenge she’s been given.

Review

SFF and speculative fiction are two genres that I naturally gravitate to, so Kindred seemed like an obvious choice. And when this was my book club’s pick for the month, I was looking forward to finally reading it. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the novel, but this was definitely different from what I’ve read in SFF, in a very good way.

When I usually read science fiction, whether that’s hard sci-fi or space opera, there’s usually some sort of direct, technical explanation behind everything. So when I was confronted with a more indirect explanation behind Dana’s time travel, I was surprised at first. Over time, I realized the symbolic context of her travels and really liked how this was presented. Every small detail of this book seems to tie to the themes as a whole, and this became more apparent to me as I was piecing together what was going on and what Butler was portraying in her work. That being said, I’m looking forward to reading this book a second time.

This is also a book that I think more people should read for the difficult realities that it shows and the history that it teaches us. The scenes that take place in the past paint a brutal and vivid picture of what life was like for slaves in the past. In the same breath, this book demonstrates how that history impacts us to this very day. And there’s so much detail that goes into exploring these themes, among others, that many days after reading I’m picking up more missed connections as I continue to think about the book. 

If there’s a book you want to sit down and spend some time with, Kindred is it. No matter what aspect of the novel you’re interested in, you’ll come out of it thinking about its contents for quite some time.