Kindred Explained

Kindred

NEW FOREWORD BY JANELLE MONÁE Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin

Summary of Dave Kindred's Leave Out the Tragic Parts

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Stray was a 17-year-old girl who had gotten a facial tattoo. She’d been dealing with weird foster care arrangements in the sticks and cornfields of Colorado. Jared gave her a drink, and she told him about how her parents had divorced and how she lived with her mother, who let her quit school in the sixth grade. #2 Jared met Stray Falldowngoboom in front of a CVS, and she agreed to take him to New Orleans for Halloween. She explained to him that riding trains wasn’t that hard, and that his only rule was not to do anything stupid. #3 At the yard in Colton, California, Goblin and Stray met up with a midget and a one-eyed man who offered them vodka. The four then rode to Barstow, sharing two half-gallons of vodka that encouraged them to scratch tattoos into their arms. #4 Stray and her crew were arrested in Yuma, Arizona, after trying to steal a purse downtown. They were hoping to buy two half-gallons of bottom-shelf vodka and steaks for dinner.

English Synonymes Explained in Alphabetical Order with Copious Illustrations and Examples Drawn from the Best Writers