Kindred: The River

Summary: 
The story starts on June 9, 1976, Dana's 26th birthday. Her husband, Kevin, and she are unpacking in their new home in Altadena. While she unpacks, Kevin becomes disheartened because he lost all of his ideas for a Christmas story while moving. As Dana pushes a box towards him, she becomes dizzy and nauseated. The room blurs before her eyes, changing from her little room to a huge forest.
Dana looks around to see that a small child is drowning in a river beside her. Instinctively, Dana dives into the water and drags the red headed boy to shore. A woman waiting near by is screaming beside her that he wasn't breathing. Dana remains calm and starts to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while the woman starts beating her. Eventually, Dana gets the woman under control and the boy breathing again. She learns that the boy's name is Rufus, which she considers ugly. However, she has no time to rest, a man is pointing a shot gun at her face.
Dana starts to feel dizzy again and finds herself kneeling in her own house again. Kevin is shocked to find her on the other side of the room. Once both he and Dana calm down, she tells Kevin about what happened to her. Kevin thinks she is insane because to him, she was gone for only a few seconds, while to Dana it was a few minutes. Dana is so freaked out, she is worried it will happen again.
Analysis:
This chapter introduces Dana to her first experience to time travel and familiarizes the readers with some of the major characters like Rufus and his mother and father.
Reaction:
I thought that it was interesting to note that Butler didn't use the words 'time travel' when talking about Dana's journey into the past. Usually when writers talk about time travel, it would usually do something like this:
Person 1: "I think I was just in the 1800's! I think I saw Napoleon!"
Person 2 (acting very astonished and unbelieving): "You mean like time travel? There is no way that happened. I'm going to come up with a reasonable explanation about why it can't happen: you were hallucinating."
Person 1: "I don't know it was very believable. I'm still going to be a skeptica-- whoa I'm time traveling again! This is the perfect opportunity to move away from the explanation and back to the story!"
That is just a summary of what goes on in my head whenever people use the word 'time travel.' Also, Dana doesn't immediately time travel again which is also great. It always seems like authors do that.

Kindred: Prologue

Summary:
The prologue opens up, shrouded in mystery. Dana Franklin, a young black woman, has woken up in the hospital without an arm and a year of her life gone without giving us (the reader) a reason. The police ask her questions as to how she lost it and Dana explains that it was an accident and not her husband, Kevin.
Dana drifts off into sleep yet again only to be woken up by her husband. Dana explains that the doctors had to amputate her arm above the elbow and asks if Kevin has gotten in trouble. Kevin thankfully says that he has not.
When she asks what he told the police Kevin responds with "The truth." Dana turns hysterical stating that she will be locked up in a mental hospital if they knew the truth.
Analysis:
Already, the reader can see something bad and unexplained has happened to Dana and that both Kevin and Dana have no idea what went on. The enigma of her missing arm sets the scene for the next chapter. This is most likely going to start to explain the story of how she lost her arm.
Reaction:
Butler sets the scene wanting her readers to be immediately taken in with the sentence: "I lost an arm on my last trip home." Butler tries to shock and excite the reader and reel them in to the novel with the first line. Admittedly, she does a great job. However, my only criticism is of the archetype of waking up in a hospital after something has gone wrong and then going back in time and then having a flashback. I feel like this happens a lot in literature. For example in Catcher in The Rye, Holden Caulfield wakes up in a mental hospital after having a mental breakdown. Other than that, I found it quite fascinating.

Initial Reaction

For my author study I chose Octavia Butler. The first thing that caught my eye was that she was a science fiction writer. Some of my favorite books have been science fiction books, although my allegiance is to fantasy. However, when I read some of the synopses of her novels, I was fascinated. They weren't like all of the science fiction works I had read before and I was enticed to read more about her.


She was born June 22, 1947 to Laurice and Octavia Butler. Laurice died when she was a baby so Butler was raised by her mother and grandmother. Butler grew up in a strict Baptist household in Pasadena, California. Butler  was a very shy and introspective girl who spent most of her time at the public library and later was diagnosed with dyslexia. 


Butler says that she“was influenced to write science fiction.... by a bad movie" at the age of 12. Butler says that she thought anyone could "write a better story than that!" So Butler wrote manuscripts to publishers when she was 13 years old and was published in 1971 for her short story "Crossover." She moved to Seattle and later she wrote an entire series called the Patternist series and after, she authored Kindred. She won the Nebula and Hugo awards for science fiction and thereafter won the MacArthur Fellowship grant. With the money she won, Butler moved back to Pasedena where she died after a fall in her home. 


During her life, Butler was a very private person. Many of her relatively close friends did not know a lot about her, leaving much to be wondered. She described herself this way" I'm uncomfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Seattle -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive."

Pictures

This photo is of the Science Fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler and the picture below Butler is her own novel, Kindred which I will be reading.