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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).
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (3/12/2026)
Last week I finished up Yesteryear for review here at BookBrowse. It was good, not great. It probably didn't help my opinion of the novel that I was expecting something different - more time travelly/historical fiction, like Connie Willis' Doomsday Book or Octavia Butler's Kindred. Yesteryear tur...
-kim.kovacs
1000 Books February 2026 Read: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
@NanK , Have you read Octavia Butler's Kindred? That one's also speculative fiction/time travel/historical fiction. I've read several of her works but that one's my favorite. @Gabi_J I hope you enjoy your scifi/speculative journey! A series I'd recommend is the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwoo...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (3/5/2026)
Finished The Good House by Tanareive Due and have just started Meet Me At The Crossroads by Megan Giddings. I too enjoyed Octavia Butler's Kindred a few years back.
-Marilyn_M
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (2/26/2026)
I'm reading 'Ashland' by Dan Simon, and the writing is absolutely beautiful! Then 'Kindred' by Octavia Butler for my neighborhood book group.
-Evonne_Benedict
What are you reading this week? (7/17/2025)
No worried, @Carol_B ! When you hit Reply, the person you're replying to shows up on the right side, just above your comments, so most folks should realize who you're responding to. :slightly_smiling_face: Regarding Octavia Butler, yeah, her books have been around for awhile (she died in 2006). S...
-kim.kovacs
"A marvel of imagination, empathy and detail." —New York Times
"One of the most original, thought-provoking works examining race and identity." —Los Angeles Times
"No other work of fantasy or science fiction writings brings the intimate environment of the antebellum South to life better than Octavia E. Butler's Kindred." —San Francisco Chronicle
This information about Kindred was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was the author of many novels, including Dawn, Wild Seed, and Parable of the Sower. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Award and a Nebula Award, and she twice won the Hugo Award.
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