Kindred by Octavia Butler

A few weeks ago a bookseller email-blasted a "100 Books You Should Read" list. Usually I scan through them and find the same old-school titles paired with the usual modern day suspects. However this list had all sorts of titles on it that I have read and loved and that I usually don't find on such lists. Clearly, this list had been created by a like-minded soul.  I started writing down the titles of everything I had never read to look up and possibly read.

Kindred was one of those books. I've read some of Butler's short stories but never one of her novels. At first I was worried it would be like The Time-Traveler's Wife (which I loved). I worried enough to think that Niffenegger had maybe stolen Butler's idea from this 1979 book.....but no.

Butler tells the tale of Dana, a black woman married to a white man,  who finds herself transported back in time to a slave-holding plantation. She is yanked out of her present life into the past in order to save the life of a white boy  - the son of a cruel slave-owner. She soon finds herself trying to use her modern-day knowledge to protect and save the people around her. But the past only sees her skin color and she is pulled into the only role she can play: slave.

What Dana must endure, must watch, must learn about her people's past is told with grace and blood; How she must finally save herself is the reason to read until the end.