Kindred

Octavia Butler 1979

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
historical literary fiction trauma injustice survival

Our Take

A Black woman in 1970s California is pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland again and again to save the life of a white ancestor who enslaves people. Butler makes the horror of that dependency visceral and structural, and Dana's body accumulates the damage of every trip. Time travel as a theory of inheritance.

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