Kindred

This is probably the most famous book on my list, but I first read it just a couple years ago. I was so engrossed in it that I gave my husband almost scene-by-scene updates on our vacation. The story Butler weaves is so compelling that he even started asking for them. 

Books about time travel abound, but few of them make the past come alive like this one. Butler takes the modern reader back to the antebellum South when her protagonist, a Black writer living in Los Angeles in the 1970s, is transported over a century back to Maryland’s Eastern… show more.

Kindred is more subtle than other novels in its main character’s efforts to change the past.

Dana, an African American woman, finds she has time-traveled back to the antebellum South where she witnesses the brutalities of slavery. However, she also realizes the plantation she is on is populated not only by her slave ancestors, but that the white owners are also her ancestors.

She finds herself forced to protect the slaveowner’s son, Rufus, even though she dislikes him, from accidental deaths, because he is her ancestor. In bonding with Rufus, Dana seeks to educate him about the wrongs of slavery… show more.

Kindred is an incredible novel that uses time travel to highlight the horrors of slavery by transporting a modern African American woman from California to the Virginian plantation where her ancestors were enslaved.

Through this experience, she gains a deeper appreciation for her ancestors’ strength and a better understanding of herself. 

My list would not be complete without Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Ms. Butler trailblazing the way and being the first woman of color to write in science fiction and urban fantasy is the reason I am a writer today. Time traveling Dana was my first exposure to not just urban fantasy before the genre bore the name, but to seeing myself in fiction that I enjoyed reading, and writing fiction that I enjoyed reading. I became immersed in her story, in her world, in her life. For the time while I read, Kindred, I became Dana. That to me… show more.

I like this novel because it contrasts two vastly different worlds—both in the same country on the same planet, but in different time periods. 

Dana Franklin, a young black woman, is suddenly swept out of her 1970s California home to an early Nineteenth Century Maryland plantation where she saves Rufus Weylin, the plantation owner’s five-year-old son, from drowning. She is “called” back many times over Rufus’ life when he’s in a jam, and each time she stays longer in the past. Over the course of her sojourns on the plantation, she must pass for a slave, which proves to be… show more.

When I was in college then grad school, everyone was talking about Octavia Butler. Given that I’m not particularly drawn to sci-fi, I ignored the talk. And then I read Kindred. It’s more an exploration of the legacy of slavery than it is a dystopian adventure, though the novel includes time-travel and adventure.

As with the other books on my list, the characters are complex and their dilemmas, seemingly irreconcilable. Set in 1976—significantly, the Bicentennial—the interracial couple at the center of the novel has to combat the attacks and abuses concerning racial mixing—in quite literal ways, as the female… show more.

Talk about family issues! In this time-traveling novel, Butler asks her Black protagonist, Dana, to come to face a White ancestor as she is transported from modern-day Los Angeles to this ancestor’s home in the antebellum South. This story held me rapt as I watched Dana’s existence depend on preserving the life of the white man who enslaved her family. She had to save him to save herself—and yet, how could she? Butler’s writing is powerful and compelling as she explores issues of race, gender, and family. Race is one of the most important issues for Americans to consider at… show more.

I met Octavia in 1999 at a science fiction convention. She was so intelligent, friendly, and inspiring. Her novel Kindred features a strong female lead character, and time travel. The way she writes is very visual and compelling and I love her voice. She weaves messages and social commentary into her stories, but in a way that brings you along for the ride. It is sad that Octavia left us so soon. I’m sure she had many more books to write that we will never see.

It's a fantasy novel, or is it horror? A Black woman is transported back in time to the slave plantation where her ancestors labored. The story has the reader asking vital questions from the beginning. The knife's edge tension almost never lets up—and when it boils over, the results are explosive.

In some ways, Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel is a conventional time travel narrative, but Butler’s investigation of American slavery and its lasting impact was prescient. Moving between the antebellum south and 1970s Los Angeles, Kindred implicitly asks us to consider the similarities and differences between the two worlds. Butler is both perceptive and generous in her ability to create and help readers understand flawed characters.