Hey there, Readers.
Forgive me for getting personal for a second. Over the last few months, I’ve talked about books as an avenue for escapism. Many of us have been shut in and bored, lonely, anxious or worse. So, it’s awesome to have an escape hatch; a way to dash out into a better (Or sometimes worse, but at the very least different!) world. I use this as a survival technique myself. I’m pretty good at it, actually. Ever since I was a kid, I’d use that combination of narrative and social norms to escape all kinds of situations I didn’t want to be in – most people, if they have any kind of social awareness, will not bother you if you have your nose buried in a book, right? Thus, it’s a perfect combination of story based distraction and an unspoken ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on my figurative door.
Right now, though, I don’t think we need a distraction. I think it’s pretty important that we’re paying attention.
Normally, these reviews spotlight independent authors and books. It’s a subject I’m passionate about and genuinely enjoy bringing to your attention. Today though, if you’d indulge me, I’m going to be talking about a different book. It’s one you actually may have already read as I know it’s taught in high schools in the U.S.A. and is from a relatively well known author, Octavia E. Butler.
Octavia E. Butler is mostly known for Science Fiction stories and those are where I found her and fell in love with her work. Parable of the Sower and the Xenogenesis Trilogy are amazing and if you’re even remotely interested in SciFi as a genre, check them out. I downloaded them via Audible a long while back and love all of them. Kindred was one I found when I wanted more of this Author’s work and it is a very different kind of story.
A small disclaimer on both the content of this story and the following Spotlight. This book deals with slavery and as such is full of violence of many, many kinds. Obviously, this isn’t a book for the very young. It’s profoundly uncomfortable in places, and that’s okay. That’s the point. Secondly, there are people who have spent great careers talking about this book and I’m not going to be able to bring any kind of new revelation to the table in regards to it; I’m just not that good, folks. It’s a piece of literature that taught me and touched me and I think it’s worth sharing that in the best way I know how. If that suits you, please read on and I hope you enjoy.
Book Stats
- Author: Octavia E. Butler
Formats: Kindle, Hard Cover, Paperback, Audiobook, and Graphic Adaptation.
Price: $9.99 for Kindle (Normally $16.00), $17.71 for Hard Cover (Normally $26.95), $9.59 for Paperback (Normally $16.00), $25.95 on Audible or one Credit, and $16.49 for Graphic Adaptation.
Length: 264 pages
Number of books in the series: It’s a stand alone story.
Basic Premise
It’s 1976 and Dana Franklin, along with her Husband Kevin, have just purchased a home in Los Angeles. It’s a little way from Dana’s former apartment so she’s not exactly far from what she knows physically. The book opens on an unsettling scene, though – it’s the aftermath of something we don’t yet know about. She’s missing an arm.
The police on the scene want to know if Kevin is in the habit of beating her. Kevin is her husband. He’s white and she’s black. The police seem to be concocting a particular narrative in their minds on the scene, but when we see Dana and Kevin talking in the hospital, we see what’s really going on. They’re a couple very much in love who have been through a lot together.
It all started the day of her 26th Birthday, when she experienced a dizzy spell that sees her fade out of 1976 Los Angeles and arrive somewhere else.
A small, red-headed boy in a wide, deep river and in obvious distress is the first thing she sees. She’s shaken, having been in one place and now suddenly in another, but she’s still quick to respond. She immediately rushes out into the water to help the kid out. She gets him to the shore and is set upon by a woman who accuses her of trying to drown her Rufus. Dana does CPR on the child and saves his life. Weirdly enough, the lady attacking her is astounded by this, like she’s never seen CPR before. This exchange is broken up by a man with a gun leveled at Dana. She knows she’s about to get shot for being a good Samaritan.
Dana feels dizziness overcome her again and suddenly, she’s back home with a very worried Kevin who saw her blink out of existence for a moment or two. He listens to her story but it’s a lot to get his head around. Clearly, though, something happened because she’s covered in mud from the river where she’d been clean before. (Remember this detail, it’s important later.)
Soon after, she’s likewise whisked away again. There’s an older red-headed boy there this time, and she’s inside. The drapes are on fire and she hurriedly helps put them out. She realizes it’s the same boy, Rufus, from before. He’s older, now, and talking to him gives her some additional context clues as to where, and more specifically when, she is. Maryland, 1815 or so.
Despite being an absolute brat by today’s standards, Rufus at the very least makes a helpful suggestion that Dana should go to the home of someone named Alice. Alice is a child of one of the few free black people near by and Rufus’s friend, of a sort. Though the place and time she’s in are unfamiliar, not all the names Dana is coming across are – she realizes that Rufus and Alice are her direct ancestors and she only seems to appear when Rufus is in real danger. She understands that by saving him, she’s saving herself because without him, she’ll never be born. She also realizes, most disparagingly, that she’s been here for hours by now where the last flash lasted bare minutes.
The true and unfortunate reality of her situation is brought home to her when several white men show up at Alice and her Mother’s home. Alice’s Father is a slave and belongs on his home plantation. He doesn’t have papers to prove he’s allowed to be at Alice’s house. What ensues is violent and doesn’t stop with Alice’s Father. Her Mother is punched for refusing the sexual intentions of one of the men. They eventually leave and Dana rushes to help… only to realize not all of the men departed. One remained behind to watch, or maybe worse. Knowing she doesn’t have papers to prove that she should be there is bad enough, but when the guy’s intentions to rape her become clear, Dana fears for her life.
That fear seems to be the catalyst to send her back to good ol’ 1970s Los Angeles.
Kevin assures her that despite the hours that she’d been in this other time and place, it was a bare few minutes in their regular time. This time, they hatch a plan. They read up on as much as they can relating to that time and place – difficult in pre-internet times! But as Kevin is about to go and figure out how to forge necessary paperwork for Dana to show should she find herself in a similar situation as before, she gets that dizzy spell again. This time, Kevin grabs on to her tightly because, remember, this time-jump doesn’t just affect Dana. It’s not Terminator rules. It also affects anything she’s touching… but will it affect another person?
You’re going to want to read it to find out.
My take
I don’t come from the United States. I’m a Citizen, now, but my formative years were spent in New Zealand and there is a lot that, by consequence, I never learned about. The ugliness and brutality depicted at times in this book shocked me. There were passages in this book that I had to rush through a little because I’m kind of a baby when it comes to descriptions of explicit suffering, and these are painfully well written. But, in this book, you’ll find a pretty faithful telling of things that really happened to real people. It’s a mean, ugly part of history, but there it is.
I think that fiction in general does an amazing job of delivering facts in a way that’s palatable. I want to know what happens to Dana. I want to know what happens to Kevin, and Rufus, and Alice and Issac. I’ll read through all of it because I care about these characters, these people. That’s why stories are important – they give us a way to connect with one another that sidesteps a lot of our prior experience and gives us a chance to engage in a dialogue we might not have been able to otherwise. That’s why diverse stories from a wide range of authors are something everyone should seek out and enjoy. And you’ll find things to connect with even while experiencing things you couldn’t connect with before. For example, Dana’s flashbacks regarding how she and Kevin met and fell in love are so sweet and heart warming that it makes the dynamic she shares with Rufus absolutely jarring and frightening. I was able to draw parallels to things in my own life; falling in love despite the odds, making a life together. How much more meaningful, then, is a story where those things are taken away unfairly? The saying “Walk a mile in another man’s shoes” refers to a mental exercise in empathy, but I’d submit to you that reading a person’s story and experiencing their words is the best version of that mile that you can walk.
That’s just a really long winded way for me to urge you to listen to people’s stories, even when they’re uncomfortable and challenging. It’s important that we do.
The book itself is wonderfully written and an extremely engaging story with characters that you’ll fall in love with and others who you’ll absolutely loathe. This is a really tightly wound narrative with immersive, descriptive prose but very little filler of any kind. You’re going to want to pay attention. There’s a lot to unpack.
I think that you should read this story, get to know Dana and her struggle just to be born.
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