Kindred

A little SFF twist enables this novel to actively contrast early 19th century slavery, with one African-American woman's perspective of the here and now. The here and now is California in the 1970ies, and Dana is a young writer who mysteriously gets transported across time and space onto a farm in Maryland in 1815. She discovers her ancestral ties to the farm, and due to her inability to return to her own time by free will, she is forced to settle in with the household. She witnesses and experiences first hand the brutal and unjust treatments slaves experience at the hand of their masters. Dana has a hard time suppressing her modern day impulses at the sigh of these injustices, yet must learn to do so in order to stay alive and protect others.

What I thought started as rather simplistic writing, quickly turns into a suspenseful tale and an interesting perspective at a dark time of American history. Butler teases interesting questions by giving the reader occasional temptations of empathy for the slave owners. How much are we all products of our time, and how quickly would we succumb to the role our skin-color imposes on us?