BRBT book club pick for february was SO good! i know a lot of yall have said this is on your tbr and i highly recommend. it’s a time travel novel set in the 1970s when our main character Dana is pulled back in time to 1815 to a plantation where she meets her ancestors and she has no idea when she’ll be pushed back into her real life in 1970.. i don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but go in blind and buckle up for the heartbreaking, terrifying, and haunting ride. i’ll be thinking about ...

wow

Wow. First book by the author but it won't be my last!

Update: Dying to watch the show but I live in Canada :(

4.5 stars “Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." Dana and her husband just settled into their first house together when she...disappeared.Like, literally disappeared. One minute she was there and the next minute she was rescuing a drowning white boy.And when she turns around, she gets called the n-word by his parents as they demand an explanation for a slave to be out and about like she is.And then she zips back to the future to her white husban...

Reading Road Trip 2020Current location: MarylandOctavia E. Butler's biography could just break your damn heart.Her father died when she was 10, she had no siblings, her family was poor.She was a self-described “loner,” a woman who was tall and awkward and friendless. From the recent bits and pieces I researched, as I started this novel, I gathered that her romantic life was either private or nonexistent. (Was she gay? Asexual? Sickly?) As far as I could tell, she had substantial medical issues a...

Later Edit: I've thought about this review a lot and I think I regret the tone I used. I stand by what I wrote about the novel but I might have been too aggressive which is not really me. However, people found their thoughts in my review so it is going to stay. Please do not take this review as personal attack if you liked this novel as it is not meant to be. DNF at 50% (with some skipping) What came first, the egg or the chicken? What came first, the badly written book or the reading slump? Har...

After reading Parable of the Sower, I had to go right out and buy Butler’s most famous novel Kindred. I was not disappointed. It is amazing that this book was written in 1976 and feels just as fresh and timely in 2016. Dana, a young African American woman who has just started a career as a writer in California, is suddenly and inexplicably yanked back in time to Maryland in 1815, where she must save a white boy named Rufus from drowning.This becomes only the first of many time traveling episodes...

“The ease. Us, the children… I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.” Butler is an author that constantly pops up on "Best sci-fi" and "Must-Read African American authors" lists and I can finally see why. This book may be my first by her, but it won't be my last. Kindred is a fascinating, horrific journey through a dark time in American history, combining eye-opening historical research with time travel.I suppose some modern readers will want to compare this sto...

Octavia Butler is an amazing writer. If you enjoy reading SF/F, or even an interest in speculative fiction, you would like her work.Kindred, first published in 1979, would become her most best-selling novel.This is also a painful book to read because of its graphic depiction of slavery and Butler wastes no time in demonizing what was demonic. Describing the slave life from the perspective of a time-travelling modern woman, Butler’s strong narrative prose is in high form for a low burden – to ill...

Octavia Butler amazes me. She writes science fiction that is full of complicated ideas about race and sexuality that are completely readable. I’ll innocently start reading, thinking only to get a solid start on the book, and suddenly discover I’m halfway through the story. That isn’t to imply she’s a light-weight, however; her works are emotionally and ethically dense, the subject of numerous high school and college essays. A recent read of Dawn inspired a number of recommendations for Butler an...