Kindred

 

Kindred  by Octavia Butler                  African-American Science Fiction

(from Amazon) “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.

(My Review)  

Wow!  What a powerful, thought-provoking story!  Dana is thrust back in time, to a plantation in the 1800's, where she finds herself saving a young boy, Rufus, the slaveowner's son.  She finds herself bouncing back and forth between the present and the past, but finds her journey is tied to Rufus (as well as her the shattering truth as it pertains to her own family).  As an African-American woman, from the twentieth-century, she finds herself caught up in a cycle of trauma and abuse of slavery as she embarks on a mission to ensure the survival of her family line.