Prior to her death earlier this year, I had never heard of Octavia Butler, but Kindred was one of the books mentioned in her obituary, and the idea of it – a sci-fi novel with an African-American woman as the central character who time travels back to the antebellum South – really intrigued me, so I put it on my wishlist. Recently, a fellow BookCrosser invited me to join her bookring for Kindred, and I was lucky enough to be first on the list. It’s a rather compact book, that packs quite a punch for all its brevity. This past weekend, I stayed up until 2:30 am one night to finish the last half of it, unable to put it down and go to sleep. The complex relationship between Dana, the main character, and the white slaver owner who unwittingly calls her back in time is fascinating. The intimate, brutal look at the lives of slaves and as Dana discovers, the ease in which a person is made, and acts, a slave is particularly compelling. An excellent intro to Butler’s work, and one that has me keen to read her other novels.

I forgot to mention that a few weeks ago I read Women of the Silk, which was our bookclub’s May selection. This was a frustrating read, as it was a good book that could have been great. Tsukiyama packs so much into her novel about girls working in a Chinese silk factory in the time between the two world wars, but is maddeningly scant, even with what should be major plot points. For example, the back of the book mentions a strike that the women organize at the factory, and makes it sound as though it’s an integral part of the book; however, it’s covered in just a few pages. There is one sentence – one sentence! – given to an incident with two of the girls that could have been a book in and of itself, and left me wondering if the author was being intentionally ambiguous or if it was just another example of her skimming over the details. I finished the book feeling that it should have either been twice as long, or had the multitude of extraneous details weeded out. It seemed to me to be a very superficial read, and I came away from it not really knowing the characters and wishing for more.