Reviews tagging 'Colonisation'

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

55 reviews

geometryprime's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0


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kiwichill's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0


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huffkjames's review

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

A spec-fic/sci-fi masterpiece. Untouchable and just as relevant today as the day it was written.

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sannesbooks's review against another edition

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adventurous dark reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This is an amazing read, but this is definitely not a light read! It basically contains all the trigger warnings you can think of, so be aware of that starting this book.

Amazing writing, and a difficult, dark, thought-provoking story to read. This story is about a black woman with modern values and norms time travelling to a time of slavery in the South of America. Even though this has the sci-fi/fantasy element of time tracelling, I wouldn't consider this much as a sci-fi book. This book leans more towards historical/literary fiction. A book exploring history, humanity, society, intereacial realationships, power dynamics, racsim, sexism and trauma.


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charliebites's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5


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scmiller's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense

4.0


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rmesquirrel's review

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adventurous emotional informative mysterious sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

I do not usually like time travel books but, this one was so well written and so powerful that the reader is just drawn in to the story. You will cry, feel joy, and learn too. 

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alpettit's review

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A tough read but important. It explores the violence of slavery and the complicated relationships that can arise from it. It explores the boundaries of humanity. It explores the ethics of what is the norm versus what is right. This book will stick with me.

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readingwithkaitlyn's review

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dark reflective sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0


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mromie's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Octavia Butler, mother of Science Fiction, blends Black feminist pedagogy seamlessly into this fictional tale of a black female writer Dana from 1976 who is mysteriously transported to 1824 antebellum Maryland at times when her white ancestor and enslaver Rufus is in life-or-death situations. 

We do not live in a time so far removed from systems and acts of oppression, violence, sexual torture, and racism as many would prefer to believe. With the blurring of time through time travel, Butler reminds us that the time from enslavement period was only few generations before us and could have been us too. To this day, enslavement exists in parts of the world, in places of war, and in renamed forms in America. 

Robert Crossley’s Reader’s Guide had insightful comments, including:
- Butler: Science fiction has long treated people who might or might not exist — ETs. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science-fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation” 
- Butler “has redrawn science fiction’s cultural boundaries…deployed the genre’s conventions to tell stories with a political and sociological edge to them, stories that speak to issues, feelings, and historical truths arising out of African-American experience. In centering her fiction on women who lack power and suffer abuse but are committed to claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly when necessary, Butler has not merely used science fiction as a “feminist didactic,” in Beverly Friend’s terminology, but she has generated her fiction out of a black feminist aesthetic.” 

- time travel as a metaphor and medium; “traveling to the past is a dramatic means to make the past live, to get the reader to live imaginatively, in the recreated past, to grasp it as a felt reality rather than merely a learned abstraction” 

- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a metaphor for the exclusion of women from acts of creation

- subtle parallels between Rufus Weylin and Kevin Franklin, system of white supremacist culture

- first hand narratives of enslavement vs Hollywood retellings and novels that sanitize or glamorize it

- Kindred as the title, literary kinship with the memoirs of formerly enslaved peoples, “chained to her ancestral past by the genealogical link that requires her to keep the oppressive slave master alive until her own family is initiated”

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