Kindred in Our Shared Shelf

Feb 14, 2016 Lord Beardsley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: feminism, african-american-literature, read2016

Beautifully well-written, gripping and relatable. Butler makes the time come alive and seen through the eyes of a black woman. Visceral and engaging. I adore her style. This is probably the best book on time travel that I've ever read. ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Jan 26, 2016 Elizabeth rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Wow.

Butler is very smart in her choice of narrative, to take a modern, independent, intelligent, feminist black woman in the 1970s and transport her to the slavery plantation of her ancestors in the early 19th century opens up space for all sorts of criticisms and conflicts. Butler skilfully mixes racial, social and gender politics into a story that is perfectly paced and completely gripping. She doesn't shy away from the horror and mistreatment of black slaves nor the complexities and nuances o ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 10, 2014 Jas rated it really liked it

Shelves: female-authors, fiction, 20th-century, feminism, history

The first third of the novel seems a bit YA to me, with the quick plot focus and relatively light investment in the horrors and troubles before Dana, who at first seems like a vessel, empty for the reader to inhabit and get a quick historical lesson. But I urge you to read on. Once Dana is forced to stay in early 1800s America for a substantial time, the pain, the struggle and the suffering, the pride and the submission, that she falls into hits home, and hits home hard.

Structurally, I found th ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jul 25, 2017 Kate rated it liked it

Shelves: young-adult, fantasy-and-sci-fi, wish-i-d-read-as-a-kid, audiobook

Listening to this was definitely a mistake. The narrator's accents frequently made it sound like a farce.

It's an interesting premise and definitely got better as it went a long. There's a lot of oversimplification and dumbed down background information about the historic time period, which made it hard for me to get into in the beginning.

I probably would have loved this in high school. Now I'm much more interested in how Dana and Kevin's relationship recovers from all the time travel and the e ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Mar 31, 2014 Rubi rated it really liked it

I liked this but it's definitely more historical fiction than science fiction. The depictions of slavery were really interesting and the pace was very fast and engaging. I didn't like how the time jumps were never explained (or apparently the characters weren't interested in researching time travel either, just took it as it came)-- in my mind, this made is less science fiction. The time jumps seemed to be taken for granted and really just served as context for the plot. I also would have liked ...more

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