Kindred
By Octavia E. Butler
I have wanted to read this book forever. When I saw a trailer for the film Antebellum last year I thought the concept looked scary/messed up. That book revolves around a black woman in her twenties that keeps being brought back to the time of slavery to save one of her ancestors over and over again through out his lifetime ( I'm not giving away anything, that info is on the back of the book.) If you are wondering why I was talking about that movie and not this book, it's because a lot of the comments I was seeing were comparing these two. I now learned that, while there are a few similarities, the plots don’t line up.
I ordered the book and then it sat on my shelf for months. My dad read the book and kept asking if I had read it yet. I finally read it for a buddy read (when you read it together with others and discuss on Facebook Messenger). I ended up reading it faster than the group because I just wanted it to be over with. A lot of fiction books I have read about slavery I find myself doing this. I did the same thing with both The Underground Railroad and Beloved.
With that being said, the book is insanely well written, and it pulls you in from the very beginning. The mix of, I want to say, sci-fi and horror is interesting. I'm not normally a sucker for time travel; the plot holes that it provides annoy me. However, this book was just fascinating. It is so heartbreaking hearing the truly horrible things that people did to each other during slavery. The fact that the slave owners saw people as property and not actual human beings was sickening. The fact that there are people today that still don't see people of color as human beings is also very disturbing.
I would say I would recommend the book but know there are some super depressing heartbreaking moments in it.
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