Kindred

Kindred is intense and unabashedly unsentimental. I would recommend it to everyone. It feels fresh and pertinent even (especially?) in 2019. Butler does a beautiful job of unraveling the majority-serving narrative that we are fed in grade school and in the media: “slavery is a thing of the past” and “it wasn't so bad for everyone”. (Utter BS, am I right?) Butler really calls out and challenges this narrative by placing modern-day characters (well, modern for the 1970s) in the antebellum South and exploring how they fall into their prescribed societal roles. How easily they did so was extremely frustrating to me as the reader, as were other action by the characters, but I think that this drove the message right home. The plot is griping and fluid, and I read most of the book in one sitting. This is my first time reading Butler, and I definitely plan to read more of her work in the future.