KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler

Refinished Th 7/22/22

This was one of my ancient paperback books and according to the flyleaf I 'began & finished on Sa 12/19/93.

A young California woman from 1976 (the book was published in 1979) is 'magically' (the mechanics of the 'time travel' is never explained) transported back to Maryland of the early eighteen hundreds. The young woman is black and her husband is white.

The novel highlights the psychological differences of existing in a society without slavery and one that does. I think this would be an excellent book to recommend to high school age students. I really liked the book.

From the novel's page at Wikipedia:

"Kindred is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. First published in 1979, it is still widely popular. It has been frequently chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organizations, as well as being a common choice for high school and college courses.

The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a proud black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, the young woman becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time.

Kindred explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism.

While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, Kindred is considered to cross genre boundaries. It has been classified also as literature or African-American literature. Butler has categorized the work as "a kind of grim fantasy."

The link to 'KINDRED' on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(novel)