Julie G (please restore our notifications)'s review of Kindred (original) (raw)

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Julie G (please restore our notifications)'s Reviews > Kindred

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Kindred
by

5211606

Reading Road Trip 2020

Current location: Maryland

Octavia E. Butler's biography could just break your damn heart.

Her father died when she was 10, she had no siblings, her family was poor.

She was a self-described “loner,” a woman who was tall and awkward and friendless. From the recent bits and pieces I researched, as I started this novel, I gathered that her romantic life was either private or nonexistent. (Was she gay? Asexual? Sickly?) As far as I could tell, she had substantial medical issues and lived with her mother, and died, far too young, at 58, of a stroke.

It's hard not to hum a few bars of Sarah Vaughn's “Lonely Woman” while sorting through Ms. Butler's online photo gallery.

And yet. . . she was a writer, and not just any writer, but a female writer of science fiction.

This is so extraordinary to me, my closeted sci-fi self has always rejoiced, just knowing that Ms. Butler's work was still out there for me to explore.

In fact, while I was researching titles for this figurative road trip of mine, I set aside my devotion to one of my all-time favorite writers, Anne Tyler, to give Ms. Butler's “sci-fi” novel from 1979 a try.

(For the record, my favorite novel set in Maryland is Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ).

So. . . how was Kindred?

Conceptually: fantastic!

A twenty-something Black woman, married to an older white man in the 1970s, disappears from her new house in California and time travels to 1815 to a plantation near Baltimore, Maryland.

The reader isn't given any more info than that. Dana, our time traveling protagonist, appears to be connected to the slave owners in Maryland, and, similar to Henry from The Time Traveler's Wife, you are asked merely to suspend your disbelief that this can happen.

In other words, if the genre of “science fiction” makes you uncomfortable, take heart, there aren't any other aspects of it here. Just one piece you need to buy into: Dana time travels and, unlike poor Henry from TTTW, she does not arrive naked at her next destination.

What Ms. Butler imagined here is juicy and delicious. . . a modern Black woman, married to a white man, is forced to have everything threatened, everything taken away from her. When her husband grabs on to her arm and travels with her on her a later journey, the plot thickens. Wow! What a crazy idea, to throw this couple and their modern ideology into the Southern cookpot. . . So much could happen here!!

So. . . does it?

Nope.

Not only that, the dialogue here is some of the worst I've ever encountered. It wasn't long before this book became the next entry on my “nobody talks like this” shelf.

Nobody talks like this to each other, and certainly not two romantic partners. The “verbal” exchanges between our young couple, Dana and Kevin, were flat-out painful for me.

I did not experience one page of this read without thinking: this is a book. I'm reading a book.

I never, not once, felt as though I had emerged into this world.

This novel lacked authentic dialogue, character development, and depth. I felt like I was in a world of cardboard cutouts for characters and poster boards for scenery.

On page 208, our time traveling protagonist, Dana, declares, “I wanted so much for it to be over.”

So did I, Dana.

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Reading Progress

March 1, 2020 –Started Reading

March 3, 2020 –34.72% ". . . you don't have to beat people to treat them brutally."

March 5, 2020 –50.35% "She had done the safe thing--had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called "mammy" in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant 1960s. . . the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about freedom. . . as she knew about the hereafter."

March 6, 2020 –63.19% "Slavery was a long slow process of dulling."

March 7, 2020 –Finished Reading

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