Kindred

Apparently this 2009 book by Octavia Butler (1947-2006) has been recently reissued and I saw reviews that caught my attention. A long time ago, I read Butler's Parable of the Sower about a post-apocolyptic world with a hyperempathic teen as the protagonist. Butler was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant and the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In this book, set alternately in 1976 and the early 1800's, Dana, a black woman is married to a white man, Kevin, and they gave just moved to a new home. While unpacking books, Dana's world disappears and she finds herself in some woods and sees a young boy, Rufus, drowning in the nearby river. She saves him but is confronted by the boy's father holding a rifle. She quickly realizes that this is nowhere she knows and, it turns out, no time that she knows. Just as suddenly, she is back in her own home dazed and confused. Within the next several weeks, she is "called" by Rufus whenever he is in mortal danger. She always manages to save his life, having determined from entries in the family bible that he is in fact one of her ancestors. But with every trip to the antebellum south (Maryland), she is put in mortal danger because she is black. Each trip takes longer in the past time--from hours, to weeks, to months-- but is only a matter or minutes, hours or days in the present. At one point, Kevin is holding her hand when she is called and he gets left behind--for 5 years in the past and over a week in the present. Rufus knows his life is dependent on Dana and yet he cannot entirely overcome the views and behaviors that surround him and, at one point, he has Dana whipped for disobeying him. This was in many ways a hard book to read because of the terrible mistreatment of black people, but Butler is a compelling writer and it was also hard to put down. 

"‘[Her] evocative, often troubling, novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human’ New York Times." (from her website). Also reviews from Kirkus, (of the new paperback edition),  Publishers Weekly (review of the graphic novel adaptation), NPR interviews the creators of the graphic novel adaptation.