davidaguilarrodriguez 's review for:

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

4.75

challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Holy Hell!

Kindred is one of those rare novels where the premise is genius, the execution is bold, and the implications just keep unfolding long after you’ve finished. 

Sending a modern Black woman back to the antebellum South to meet her enslaved ancestors is already a good setup. But Octavia E. Butler doesn’t stop there. Oh no — Octavia was feeling herself when she wrote this one. My god, she pushes the premise to the breaking point in the best way: She has Dana go back not just to witness history, but to PROTECT

HER WHITE SLAVE-OWNING RAPIST ANCESTOR(!!!) so he can survive long enough to father her family line. And she doesn’t stop there. Dana befriends him. Feels conflicted toward him. Might even fall a little bit in love with him — and he with her. Meanwhile, her relationship with her enslaved ancestor, Alice, is often strained to the point where they're almost enemies at times.

The emotional and philosophical tensions in these relationships are off the charts!

And then you layer in the fact that Dana is married to a white man in 1976, and already facing racism around their interracial relationship. You start to see just how many cultural landmines Butler is threading here — and how deftly she does it. The mirroring of a modern interracial relationship with the twisted, morally abhorrent "interracial relationship" between slave-owner and enslaved woman was honestly brain-breaking and soul-shattering:

I was beginning to realize that he loved the woman—to her misfortune. There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one. 
"I didn't want to just drag her off into the bushes," said Rufus. "I never wanted it to be like that. But she kept saying no. I could have had her in the bushes years ago if that was all I wanted. ... If I lived in your time, I would have married her. Or tried to."

The pathetic longing but inability to relinquish control was an incredibly complex depiction that illuminated slavery while pushing further to touch on general power dynamics between men and women. The relationships in this book are far more twisted than you'd expect, and much more revealing of the human condition because of it. 

The book operates on so many levels: it’s about race, yes, but also about gender, power, survival, history, and most of all, inheritance — personal and national. How do we carry our ancestors with us, and what does it mean when they were perpetrators as much as victims?
 
Butler’s prose is simple, even plain — and honestly, that’s probably the right move. The story and the ideas are doing so much heavy lifting that ornate prose would collapse under the weight. Structurally, it’s tight and effective. My only note is that I wish there had been a bit more explanation for the time travel. I expected more sci-fi logic, but once I accepted it as fantasy — as Butler intended, btw — I settled in.
 
The characters walk the line between realism and archetype. Dana can be frustratingly naive, but that naivety is the point — she has to learn, and we have to learn with her. Kevin is thin, but that feels appropriate too: he’s a man who means well, but we never quite know how deep his convictions go. And Rufus… Rufus is a literary villain for the ages. You hate him, for sure, but you feel for him. The best kind of villain. 
 
This is one of the most powerful, layered, and intellectually daring novels I’ve read. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t moralize. It just drags you back in time and dares you to look.