Kindred ~ by Octavia E. Butler, 1979, fiction (Maryland), 9/10I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.Wow! What a beginning. Of course, I wanted to keep reading. This is a time travel book. (I'm on a roll, since the last novel I finished was 11/22/63, about a man who went into the past hoping to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK.) Here's a synopsis the back cover of Kindred, which I got from my library:
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
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Ouch! I wonder why she lost her arm?
ReplyDeleteHere's mine: http://myreadersblock.blogspot.com/2012/01/friday-memes_13.html
Can't tell you. That answer is not revealed until the end of the book, so it would be a spoiler to answer your question.
ReplyDeleteWhat an opening sentence! This would certainly be a page-turner for me combined with the time-travel aspect.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like such an intense read. I hope the whole thing lives up to the description and opening sentence!
ReplyDeleteLooks interesting!
ReplyDeleteThe book is so powerful that by the middle I've forgotten about the arm and it comes as this big crash again at the end.
ReplyDeleteI also remember listening to it on audio once at the end of a long drive. It was on a disk with some of the really tough passages in it, and I really appreciated how Butler started jumping around in time a lot to tell the story, nodding to myself that this technique really helped portray the awfulness without degenerating into sordidness, when I noticed that I had somehow pushed the "random track" button on the radio.
I really enjoyed Kindred. I'd forgotten about the opening line. It's definitely a grabber.
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