Kindred by Octavia Butler

 

Kindred by Octavia Butler is among the earliest of science fiction written by a black woman. Unlike much of Butler's work, which focuses on stories set in a mostly dystopian future, Kindred tells the story of a modern black woman time-traveling back into the antebellum American South.  

Butler's writing is clear, coherent, and honest.  There's no sugarcoating the gruesome aspects of slavery, but what's so amazing about this book is how quickly the reader, along with our protagonist Dana, become somewhat inured to the realities of day-to-day life with slavery as a norm.  She easily slips into a "comfortable" existence, doing chores, sleeping in an attic space with other slaves, and knowing that she could be sold, beaten, or raped at any moment.  It's a brutal look at how something that seems so barbaric to us now could become normalized.

I don't always love a time travel story, but I do think it was a smart strategic move on Butler's part to just avoid any explanation of how or why the time traveling is taking place.  There are rules, but Dana doesn't spend any time trying to figure out who or what makes the rules. She just accepts them and moves on.  This prevented me from trying to figure it out, and allowed me to just be more immersed in whichever world Dana was in.

I think this is the type of book that will stick with me. Months from now, I'll be thinking about how easily it is to assimilate into a dark world, I'll be thinking about how much we have or haven't changed from the 1800s, and I'll be hoping that we can push against "the new normal" of the last year and resist making it a permanent change.