I love Octavia Butler. She is to-date the only author for whom I wept uncontrollably at her passing.

I'd been putting off Kindred for a while because I knew it would be a rough ride. Nearly every book by Butler is hard slog. Not because the author is lacking, but just the opposite. She is amazingly good at putting the reader at a different time and place and almost always that time and place is dangerous and extremely painful.

Every book I've read by her has found me often with my finger holding my place in the book while I stare into space examining my own beliefs and the implications of the story put before me.

Kindred uses a fantastic mechanism to tell a very real story. I like that Dana's time travel is never explained. I thought the character development was spot on. And it was simultaneously refreshing and horrifying to get such a different perspective on antebellum slavery than what most history books only gloss over.