book review kindred octavia butler

By Octavia E. Butler

‘Kindred’ by Octavia E. Butler is, at its core, much more than just a work of historical science fiction but also harsh drilling against racial social injustice.

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

With ‘ Kindred ’, readers observe how Octavia E. Butler’s masterly description and art of storytelling – with an easy, minimalistic flow of diction – make the book such an unputdownable piece of art. The book is a complete joy to read and has several takeaways and hidden lessons for readers to walk away with.

A Plunge in the Deep End

Octavia E. Butler – through ‘ Kindred ’ – dares to tackle a range of interesting topics which are considered very complicated and controversial to handle. And despite being written by a Black author, the book doesn’t show signs of pontification.

After reading ‘ Kindred ’, I’m left with one thought: It’s a brave and courageous book, and Butler must have been a brilliant writer of her time for going so deep and thorough on the themes in less than three hundred book pages.

Themes such as gender, violence, power, abuse, slavery, and marriage, among other things, are given a good amount of time in the book; and then there is the time travel aspect which in itself is as intricate as it is perplexing – and usually a stand-alone subject of thought.

Twenty-six years old young female protagonist Dana really does travel back in time on more than a few occasions to save her ancestor from potential life-threatening dangers which, for the most part, are caused by either Rufus himself or his mean father Tom.

Interestingly, it does seem as though Dana has the power to travel through time, but a more keen attention to the facts of the book suggests she doesn’t and is only able to do so because of being summoned somehow, someway into the 1800s by Rufus every time he’s in trouble.

However, Dana does have greater control over departing Rufus’ messy world and back to her own 1976 timeline, and this is usually when she feels afraid or becomes terrified for her life. Butler certainly gets readers in deep water with ‘Kindred’ but is also kind enough to salvage the story in ways that are verifiable and realistic.

The Precariousness of Racial Injustice

Butler is one of the first science fiction genre writers to unite gender, ethnicity, and race with the intricacies of time travel. And although her book ‘ Kindred ’ is mostly classified as belonging to sci-fi, interracial matters clearly top the list of important agendas discussed for the most part of the book.

In ‘ Kindred ’, Butler tries to compare life and the whole living conditions in two distinct realities – first is Dana’s present time of 1976, and second is Rufus’ era of the early 1800s. From a reader’s standpoint, it’s clear that the biggest cause of social instability in both timelines is racism – a concept to which the practice of slavery came to be born.

While policies have greatly improved interracial relationships in Dana and Kelvin’s world, it is a lot worse in Rufus’ world, and this is a major reason readers will notice a streak of political, socio-economic, and socio-psychological backwardness in Rufus’ time.

A Transgenerational Lesson for Posterity

Despite a torturous description of a world where one race dominated over the other – followed by a subsequent sufficing of actions that are abusive as they are dehumanizing, for posterity, the most important take away from Butler’s groundbreaking book ‘ Kindred ’ is the need for all of the human race to stand together in unity, and recognize that we are first of all humans – before we are Black or white.

How good a book is ‘ Kindred ’ for readers?

‘ Kindred ’ is an award-winning novel and considered perhaps the greatest work of prolific writer Octavia E. Butler. This makes it worthwhile for readers – especially if you love books about time travel, family, and interracial marriages.

What lesson can be gleaned from Butler’s book ‘ Kindred ’?

Unity is a strong message subtly passed across by Butler to her readers. There’s a call to unite and bury differences in others to attain a more progressive human society.

How long does it take the average reader to start and finish the novel ‘ Kindred ’?

‘ Kindred ’ is a book with less than three hundred pages, so it shouldn’t take more than a few hours reading a day for the average person.

Kindred Review

Kindred by Octavia Estelle Butler Digital Art

Book Title: Kindred

Book Description: 'Kindred' by Octavia E. Butler is a bold and unifying novel exploring the depth of human division and the potential beauty of unity.

Book Author: Octavia E. Butler

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: HarperCollins Publishers

Date published: June 26, 1979

ISBN: 978-0-06-075440-8

Number Of Pages: 261

Transitioning

Kindred Review: We Were Humans First, Before We Became Black or White

‘ Kindred ‘ by Octavia E. Butler is a courageous book that dares to unite all people – irrespective of skin color, ethnicity, and gender. The book does so by showing readers the height of humanity’s disunity and how unpretty it could be, and then hints at the beauty and progress a united human race can become. It’s an award-winning book with several appraisals from top publishers and authors. It’s a book to not miss out on.

Courageous narrative
Promotes unity
Easily readable
Replete with violent scenes
Slightly vague climax
Not fact-based

Join Book Analysis for Free!

Exclusive to Members

Save Your Favorites

Free newsletter, comment with literary experts.

About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

About the Book

Discover the secrets to learning and enjoying literature.

Join Book Analysis

What Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Can Teach Us About Human Behavior

B y the time Octavia Estelle Butler published Kindred in 1979, she had begun to solidify her place in the science-fiction genre—no small feat for a Black woman in a world dominated by white men and their stories of colonizing planets and alien invasions. She had achieved moderate success with her first three books, Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, and Survivor— a series set in a far future world of telepathic humans and highlighting the power dynamics between masters and the enslaved. Kindred, her fourth novel, was a departure, a story in which a contemporary Black woman in an interracial marriage is summoned back in time to Maryland in 1815.

Back in 2001, I was an aspiring writer attending the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in Seattle. Butler had attended a Clarion workshop 30 years prior as a student, but now she was back to teach eager pupils like me. I, like many others , became a fan long before the T-shirts and the Butler-tried-to-tell-us social media posts. Having grown up with a healthy diet of science-fiction movies and TV shows as a child of the ‘80s, reading about Black girls and women in the future was validating. While Butler’s novels are certainly cautionary tales, she was not a fortune teller. She was a lover of science, an inquisitive writer, and a keen observer of society. Butler simply paid close attention to human behavior.

The idea that human beings are hierarchical permeates Butler’s work, and it’s what she tried to explain to me during an in-depth conversation at a party in Seattle. I was a young, idealistic Pan-Africanist and feminist who believed that Black liberation could be achieved by dismantling patriarchy and white supremacy. Butler believed that humans crave dominance. Eradicate one group and another will take its place. This is also true for Black people and other marginalized groups, she told me. It was a hard lesson to digest, and it was an idea that she instilled in her teaching: We are a flawed species and in order to convey that in our stories, we had to study our surroundings and say something big about the world with close details. “Make people touch and taste and know,” she wrote in one of her journals. “Make people feel, feel, feel!”

Throughout the ‘70s, on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, Butler wrote short stories where she imagined dystopian futures filled with power-hungry shapeshifters, vulnerable empaths, and parasitic aliens. Then, she turned her attention to the visceral past and placed a Black woman at the center of her own story. Kindred is where Butler’s lessons on writing with closely felt details and nuanced physicality are on full display. Time-travel stories had been a staple of science-fiction for decades, but we didn’t—and still don’t—often associate the genre with Black women’s bodies and slave narratives.

Slavery was the terrain of historical fiction, and the late ‘70s were a pinnacle for those stories. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published in August 1976 and the miniseries premiered in January 1977. Americans confronted the horrors of slavery on their televisions in the form of young LeVar Burton’s defiant Kunta Kente. This was historical fiction at its best.

Kindred was something different. In it, Butler merged history with the present, and a contemporary Black woman’s body became a time machine—a device to fold time back on itself. Butler presented slavery as a haunting science that created monstrosities, much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . Dana Franklin, Kindred ’s protagonist, must survive antebellum plantation life from the perspective of 1976’s racial politics. Here, the future is prologue. Dana stands at the junction between the monstrous past and the alien world of post-racial America—a perpetually elusive dream since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. In Kindred , horror and science-fiction intersect. Yet, Butler described the work as a sort of “grim fantasy.” And now, 43 years after its publication, nearly 46 years after the premier of Roots , 16 years after Butler’s death, and in middle of yet another violent “racial reckoning” in America, that fantasy gets a TV series.

Read More: FX’s Kindred Is a Solid, Long Overdue Adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Masterpiece

I wonder what Butler would make of this, of her story about a Black woman traveling back in time to contend with not only the past and her ancestry but with her body reaching a new audience of millions of viewers in 2022. Today we know that intergenerational trauma, particularly for the descendants of slavery (both enslaved and enslavers), is a biological and psychological fact. We also know that a variety of ailments affect Black women at disproportionate rates . And somehow, Butler already knew all this when she wrote Kindred. She correctly observed that pain, torture, and dismemberment are horrors that leave scars on the psyche—scars that are inherited by future generations. She knew that only by intertwining the past with the present could we begin to connect the cellular dots. Butler’s much-praised foresight is not only evident in her Parable series, where a demagogue president, Christopher Donner, wants to “make America great again.” It plays a central role in Kindred, where she shows us that the traumas of the past can live in the body and impact the present and the future.

Even as stories of America’s horrific past are pulled from libraries and schools across the country, history continues to live on in our cells. Honest storytelling sheds light on generational trauma, and if we heed its warnings, it can be medicine and possibly an inoculation. As the descendants of enslavers and the enslaved, we are reminded that we can be both monster and alien in our cruelty towards each other and in our ability to adapt and change.

“God is change,” writes Lauren Oya Olamina, the teenage protagonist of Butler’s Parable series, as she forms Earthseed, a neo-religion and fringe community attempting to remake humanity amid societal collapse. In Kindred , the dystopia is slavery; change is the passage of time as a nation moves from war and emancipation to reconciliation; and god is Dana, a Black woman who stands at the precipice of it all—enslavement and freedom, biology and physics, science and memory.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Nicola Coughlan Bet on Herself—And Won
What Kind of President Would Kamala Harris Be?
Is Adrenal Fatigue Real?
Why It's So Hard to Quit Vaping
Our Guide to Voting in the 2024 Election
The 10 Races That Will Determine Control of the Senate
Column: How My Shame Became My Strength
Meet TIME's Newest Class of Next Generation Leaders

Book Review: Kindred by Octavia Butler

By: Author Jen - MMB Book Blog

Posted on 22 September 2024

Kindred is a novel by Octavia Butler that blends elements of time travel and historical fiction.

The story follows Dana, a young Black woman from 1976, who is mysteriously transported back in time to the antebellum South. Here she must confront the harsh realities of slavery and her own ancestral connections.

Disclosure : This post may include affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases

Genre: Historical Fiction Author: Octavia Butler Buy: Amazon | Waterstones Published: 1979

In 1976, Dana dreams of being a writer. In 1815, she is assumed a slave. When Dana first meets Rufus on a Maryland plantation, he’s drowning. She saves his life – and it will happen again and again. Neither of them understands his power to summon her whenever his life is threatened, nor the significance of the ties that bind them. And each time Dana saves him, the more aware she is that her own life might be over before it’s even begun.

Kindred Book Review: My Opinion

Time travel and science-fiction aren’t usually my go-to genres, but I absolutely loved this book. It’s a powerful blend of historical fiction, sci-fi and deeply human storytelling and I found myself hooked from the first page.

I thought Octavia Butler handled the time travel element brilliantly. The shifts between 1970s California and the harsh reality of a 19th-century slave plantation felt seamless.

Since I’m not particularly a fan of science fiction, I appreciated that the story didn’t get bogged down with trying to explain how time travel worked. I was happy to just go along with it!

Each trip back in time really heightened the tension and stakes. I could really appreciate how Octavia Butler used sci-fi elements to explore powerful themes like race, identity, and survival in a way that felt incredibly authentic. There are some truly gut-wrenching moments in the story that illustrate the devastating reality of slavery at the time.

Dana, the protagonist, is a character I connected with instantly. Her strength, vulnerability and moral dilemmas as she navigates this horrifying past are what make the story so gripping.

Rufus is also particularly complex character. He starts off as a sweet, yet petulant child, but as the story progresses and the institution of slavery warps him, he becomes increasingly cruel. His descent perfectly highlighted how the horrors of slavery not only brutalised the enslaved but also corrupted those in power.

Overall, even though I don’t usually gravitate toward sci-fi, I loved how Kindred used the genre to deliver such an emotional, thought-provoking, and unforgettable story.

Book Reviews on...

By octavia butler, recommendations from our site.

“I selected Kindred because it is one of two portals to her work that most people come across, and she wrote it to reach a certain audience. Kindred is the story of Dana, a 1970s African-American woman—‘black’ as she calls herself at the time—who is drawn back through time to preserve the life of one of her ancestors who is white and a slave owner in the South. And over a number of confrontations with him, he grows, he becomes increasingly dangerous to her and she eventually comes out of this situation physically maimed and intellectually changed.” Read more...

The Best Books for an Introduction to Octavia Butler

Nisi Shawl , Novelist

“For me, as a reader and writer, the only way I can get excited about a time travel paradox is when there are these larger social questions that have to be answered. Octavia Butler always forces you as a reader to jam your face right into all the contradictions and injustices in society, and how much we allow them to continue happening in order to survive.” Read more...

The Best Time Travel Books

Annalee Newitz , Novelist

Other books by Octavia Butler

Fledgling by octavia butler, parable of the sower by octavia butler, 'bloodchild' and other stories by octavia butler, wild seed by octavia butler, our most recommended books, on liberty by john stuart mill, middlemarch by george eliot, war and peace by leo tolstoy, frankenstein (book) by mary shelley, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, dracula by bram stoker.

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce, please support us by donating a small amount .

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

IMAGES

Book Review: "Kindred" by Octavia Butler
Review: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Book Review: Kindred by Octavia Butler
Of Kindred Octavia Butler Book Review
BLAC Book Review: Octavia Butler's Kindred
Book Review: Time And Race in Octavia Butler's 'Kindred'

VIDEO

Book Summary of Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
PGCMLS Book Talk: Kindred by Octavia Butler
TOOK AN L TEACHING + WHAT I BEEN READING
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler Live Discussion
Ep. 9 Kindred Book Review
Kindred in 30 minutes. Octavia E. Butler

COMMENTS

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler | Goodreads
Octavia Butler's Kindred tells a gripping tale and reminds us of how we must not let the stories of our past happen again. Kindred follows 26-year-old Dana, a black woman who lives in California and gets transported to the antebellum South.
Kindred Review: We Were Humans First, Before Black or White
Kindred Review: We Were Humans First, Before We Became Black or White ‘Kindred‘ by Octavia E. Butler is a courageous book that dares to unite all people – irrespective of skin color, ethnicity, and gender. The book does so by showing readers the height of humanity’s disunity and how unpretty it could be, and then hints at the beauty and ...
Review: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler — The Mistress of the ...
Kindred was written by Octavia E. Butler and published in 1979. It’s not as old as my other classic book choices but I really wanted to share it with you all here anyway. It was easily one of my favorite books from 2019 and I’m constantly recommending it to friends.
What Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Teaches About Human Behavior ...
B y the time Octavia Estelle Butler published Kindred in 1979, she had begun to solidify her place in the science-fiction genre—no small feat for a Black woman in a world dominated by white...
Book Review: Kindred by Octavia Butler - mmbbookblog.com
Kindred is a novel by Octavia Butler that blends elements of time travel and historical fiction. The story follows Dana, a young Black woman from 1976, who is mysteriously transported back in time to the antebellum South.
Kindred - Five Books Expert Reviews
Kindred is the story of Dana, a 1970s African-American woman—‘black’ as she calls herself at the time—who is drawn back through time to preserve the life of one of her ancestors who is white and a slave owner in the South. And over a number of confrontations with him, he grows, he becomes increasingly dangerous to her and she eventually ...