![]() ![]() There are moments of intense suspense and horrific violence, as well as moments of melting kindness and (nearly) redemptive understanding. Staunton effortlessly reads the voices of various characters, from an educated Southern Californian black woman of the 1970s to a Maryland slave or slave-owner of the early 19th century. Her natural voice is just right for Dana's warm, thoughtful, and honest first-person narration. Kim Staunton does a marvelous job reading Kindred. Although there is no scientific explanation for the time travel, Butler's depiction of life on a slave plantation is convincingly detailed and realistic. Butler puts her protagonist Dana Franklin, a contemporary African American woman, into incredibly difficult physical, moral, and existential situations via time travel to the antebellum Maryland plantation of her ancestors. Octavia Butler's Kindred is a terrible, fascinating, and moving novel, so vivid in its examination of the Southern slave system and its negative effects on slaves (especially) and masters (subtly). The Past of Slavery Still Moves and Wounds Us The story is generational, her own survival dependent on that of the white man brought up to own, use, and trade in slaves. Thrown back and forth through time, answering his unknowing calls for help and being released when each threat is resolved, she spends sometimes minutes sometimes months in a world where she can be whipped for looking at someone the wrong way. Instead it tells the story of slavery through family as the protagonist finds herself pulled back in time from 1976 to antebellum Maryland in the US a modern black woman with rights and expectations suddenly stripped of these as she is drawn to the aid of a white ancestor with his own rights and expectations. ![]() As you might expect from Butler, this is science fiction but without lasers, phasers, or malevolent AI. If you're not black - that's a lot of us - and you've never been a slave - that's most of us this story puts you right in the middle of American slavery where we can touch the edges of experiencing it ourselves. I am not going to listen to any more, leaving it unfinished. But the time travel idea means that the character Dana is not really a slave, just put upon, and only there for self interested reasons, to save her ancestors. I thought maybe this book would offer insights about human perceptions of one another, or provide insight into slavery from a slave's perspective. The Narrator here has rather a 'hard-done-by' voice and always sounds awful even on the rare occasions when nothing terrible is going on. There is nothing educational, informative, or even challenging about it, just horror. ![]() If you can imagine the horrors, you do not need to read this. The idea is that Dana can travel in time, so goes back and forth between living in contemporary New York to being a slave in the deep south in the 1800's. All of that is in this book with beatings, rape, murder, stabbing, children sold away from their mother, hanging, brutal work and more. ![]() Slavery in America was cruel and vicious. Kim Staunton's narrative talent magically transforms the listener's earphones into an audio time machine. Butler skilfully juxtaposes the serious issues of slavery, human rights, and racial prejudice with an exciting science-fiction, romance, and historical adventure. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life.ĭuring numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she's been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother.Īuthor Octavia E. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. The first science-fiction written by a Black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of African-American literature. ![]()
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