Review: Kindred

Introduction

Kindred by Octavia Butler follows Dana, a black woman from 1976 who is repeatedly thrust back into the Antebellum South where she must save Rufus Weylin, the son of a plantation owner and Dana’s ancestor.

Each time Dana goes back to the past, her stays become
progressively longer and more dangerous, requiring her to use all her cunning
and wits to stay alive.

Plot

Overall, I thought the plot was interesting, if a bit
melodramatic at times. Yeah, slavery was awful, but the scenes of Dana and
others being whipped and severing other punishments felt like overkill.

I also didn’t get Rufus’s obsession with Dana. Sure, he may have been starved for attention and Dana saved his life multiple times, but I still don’t get why he wanted her around him all the time.

Maybe if Dana had stayed around and helped him following the first time she was pulled to the past, I could buy some bond forming between them.

The other issue I had with the plot is why Dana or Kevin didn’t buy a gun to go in her bag. While it was illegal for blacks, freeman or slave, to own guns in Rufus’s time, a modern gun would have been more effective than the knives Dana brought with her.

Characters

Aside from Dana, I didn’t get a real sense of the other
characters beyond Dana’s impressions of them.

Rufus’s motives didn’t make sense to me at all, especially
since he claimed to love Dana and Alice, yet treated them horribly.

Aside from Sarah and Carrie, most of the slaves on the
Weylin Plantation weren’t developed at all, which doesn’t make sense because
Dana’s stays lasted months at a time so she should have interacted with the
others more.

As for her husband Kevin, I don’t see why Butler chose to make him white other than for the increased drama of them being a covert interracial couple in the antebellum south, and his whiteness saving Dana from being sold into slavery farther south because he passed as her master.  

Writing

I found Butler’s writing to be a bit amateurish, relying heavily on telling via adverbs. And when she did show us things this would be crippled by telling. Such as on one of Dana’s later trips to the plantation where she notes Sarah is old and then describes her hair streaked with gray and face weathered with age line.

I also didn’t like Butler’s tendency to spell everything out
to readers when it came to how bad things where on the plantation.

Conclusion

Given all its fault I still enjoyed Kindred and would
recommend it to anyone looking to broaden their sci-fi reading. I give Kindred
three out of five stars.