Review: Kindred, by Octavia Butler

This book is a cross between Jack Finney’s time travel classic Time and Again and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Written in 1979 and set three years earlier, it tells the story of a young African American woman who is somehow transported back in time to a Maryland slave plantation decades before the Civil War. She was transported there (for want of a better word) to rescue a young white man, son of a slave-owner. One reviewer said that the time travel part of the story was the least important, which was probably true. In fact, the book does take a hard look at slavery, racism and sexism. But I for one cannot resist a good time travel tale, and this is one of them.