Kindred

The story of a contemporary (1976) black woman who travels back in time and meets her slave and slave-owning ancestors in the antebellum south. In order to stay alive and return home, Dana must quickly learn the rules of the world she has entered and also the rules governing her time travel. Kindred is a riveting story. The structure, Dana visits the past multiple times following the lives of her ancestors as they age, draws you along and builds tension as you wonder and worry over how things will end. Octavia Butler presents a very tangible world including both the mundane and the terrible. The sci-fi of the story is the time travel element, but the meat of this novel is the situations and difficult choices Dana is faced with as she tries to stay alive and also protect her ancestors, both black and white, in order to ensure her own existence.