Reviews with content warning for Colonisation - Kindred

Reviews tagging 'Colonisation'

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

56 reviews

lu_mog's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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erebus53's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
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

5.0

This is a book that I read as part of the 52 Book Challenge 2023. I had heard the name Octavia E. Butler before but had never bothered looking into it because I thought the name sounded like an airport novel writer or cozy-mystery-old-lady read.. I was so wrong. So silly of me. This book is a nuanced piece of science fiction that explores life and slavery in Antebellum USA, through the eyes of an interracial couple from 1976.

This is a tale of survival. Dana finds herself dislocated from her time and place and landing in the early 1800s in the middle of emergency. At first she saves a small boy from drowning, and then later she stops a fire. As she follows the pattern she realises that she has a connection to a young man who has very bad luck and who she continually has to save from his misadventures.

First hand, she finds out how Black and White people are divided in status and role, and how those divisions are brutally enforced. She hopes that by befriending this small child she may be able to stop him from developing into the same sort of man as his brutal, plantation-owner father.

In the same vein as Time Traveler's Wife (a book published 24 years after it)... hmm, ok I'm going there. *Incredible Tangent Person! go!* Time Traveler's Wife was interpreted for screen 6 years after its publication and Kindred, a book that also deals with slipping through time involuntarily, was adapted for screen 43 years after its publication in 1979. OK, one of those books was about a man who met the woman he eventually married when she was a child and who develops a relationship with her in chronologically asynchronous order, and the other was about a Black woman coming to understand her family's history, slavery and the brutality of oppression, by rescuing her White, several times great grandfather from death.. so I guess it's more about whether or not people want to discuss Grooming, or Inter-Racial marriage and the brutality of slavery... but why did we have to wait so long before that was a thing?

Kindred is a thoroughly compelling read and I seriously raced through the book, not wanting to put it down. The relationships are rich and messy, and offer a convincing look at what happens when we care about people despite their faults. It is a story of survival, and through Dana we are allowed a glimpse of the real life, love, fear, and survival that was endured by those living and working plantations.

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lianne_rooney's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional 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? It's complicated

4.5

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sarahreadsromance's review against another edition

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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

I have no words. This book does an incredible job at demonstrating the complexities of slavery in the US and the social and power dynamics along with it. It’s easy to think of slavery as a distant issue, one that is so far from humanity today. By humanizing Rufus and other white characters, Butler shows how society got to that place and how and why systems of oppression are maintained.

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zforzo's review

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

So… I Will say that this book really made up for itself in the second half. The characters can feels so flat and unrealistic that this book can be difficult to get into. As much as I love Butler she was asking for a lot of suspension of disbelief here and I’m not sure it did her any favors. However it is a really interesting exploration of nature vs. nurture and is an important reminder as to why we cannot just forget about 400 years of visceral pain and suffering. Butler truly puts the reality of slavery (or as much of a reality as we can say bc I feel it’s something you can never truly comprehend unless you’ve been through it) in our faces and it is unbelievably grueling and heartbreaking just to read. It sort of changes your perspective on what freedom truly means. It was also interesting to see how this insidious system not only harmed those enslaved but the enslavers as well, though it’s not like I really have any sympathy for them. I still feel iffy about how complex of a character Rufus is while many of the enslaved people felt 1 dimensional with their lives being reduced to just that, slaves.

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