My second reading was even better than the first. One of Octavia Butler's best works of some really stellar stuff. Probably the best if not only way a modern person can close to understand the horror and contradictions of slavery. Impossible to put down.

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I've never read a book about time travel. I have read about slavery before. This book combined the two and it was fantastic! There are also discussion questions at the end to make you ponder even more.

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I couldn't put this book down. A cross between science fiction and black history, it crosses from 1976 to the early 1800's and back again and perfectly parallels a black woman's life between the periods. Highly recommended reading!

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Science-fiction meets slavery in the antibellum south? I know its crazy but this is one of the most creative and gripping books I have ever read. I started reading while my son was taking his afternoon nap on a Saturday and finished it Sunday night. Yeah, its that good. Dana is a young, black woman living in the 1970's with her white husband, Kevin. While they are unpacking boxes in their new home, she's suddenly transported to a plantation in South Carolina where she must carefully interact with the masters and slaves in order to survive. You gotta read this book and you'll understand exactly why its been celebrated for over 25 years.

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An amazing and believable blend of history, time travel and interacial relationships. Don't miss this one--highly recommended!

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Certainly a different kind of time-travel book, and for a 70+ yo white man, a grim glimpse into slavery in the US. Lots of questions about why Dana did or didn't do this or that (like bring more useful items with her into the past); but all in all it was a compelling read. Wish the author had created a family tree and that we'd been given more information about the fate of some characters.

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I found this copy of Kindred on a book trading site after reading several good reviews of it online. This is a fantasy/sci-fi time travel novel first published in 1979. The narrator is a young black woman, Dana, who is transported from 1976 back to the antebellum South of the early 1800s. She is apparently summoned there by her ancestor, Rufus, the son of a plantation owner who is in danger of drowning. Dana is able to save Rufus and is flung back to 1976 when she is threatened with a gun by Rufus's father. But that's not the end of her time travels. Every time Rufus is in peril, Dana is sent to his rescue and when Dana is in peril she is able to return to her present. During one of her time trips, her husband Kevin, who is white, is taken with her and winds up stranded in the past for five years. While Dana is in the past, she becomes somewhat of a fixture on the plantation and lives alongside the slaves (some of which are her ancestors) and the whites who own them. Butler describes the brutalities of life on the plantation including the selling of family members by the plantation owners, beatings and whippings, harsh conditions in the fields, and maimings of runaways. Every time Dana returns, she is taken back to 1976, but it is sometimes years that pass in the past in between her time trips. The people in the past age while Dana remains ageless.

Butler does a great job of showing the harshness and brutality of slavery from the point of view of the people of the time as well as from the perspective of Dana and her husband. The means of the time travel is never really explained and I have read that Butler considered this more of a fantasy novel. One reviewer points out that this was published two years after the Roots TV miniseries which could have been an influence on the story. I haven't read any of Butler's other science fiction but I will be on the lookout for them.

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There were many things I liked a lot about this book. Having a modern black woman personally experience slavery and speaking in the first person of that experience was extremely powerful for me. Yet the time travel conceit grew old for me as the book went on, and I found my attention wandering a little. I just wanted something new and unexpected to happen. But don't get me wrong....I still found it a powerful and compelling narrative, tho not a perfect one.

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enjoyed this book, It was well written and grabed me from chapter one, I could not put it down. great read.

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