Why Kindred Clicks

To me Kindred was a more enjoyable novel despite my tastes being in situations involving less realism. Kindred had you hooked from prologue to epilogue with the story of how Dana lost an arm traveling in time. The sudden shifts in time happening at the end of chapters make you want to keep reading to find out what Dana has been thrown into this time. It's partially these sudden involuntary shifts that make Kindred work. If Dana was looking into her crystal ball watching Rufus struggle, she might think things through and come to the conclusion she doesn't need him alive in order to exist, Dana might just try and see what happens if he dies if she's just sitting there watching him from her own time. But the fact that she's simply violently ripped out of her own time right into life or death situations for Rufus and sometimes herself. These leaves things much more up to instinct as she doesn't have the luxury of observing from 3rd person. Time passing in her own world faster than in Rufus' really helps Kindred too because it doesn't allow for Dana to have really much of a reprieve from the unpleasantness of the antebellum south. As such when she's home she really only reflects upon her experience away relative to her experience at home and she somewhat prepares herself for these seemingly inevitable journeys. The cruel hostile environment of the south further facilitates things due to the slave work she is required to do. Though sometimes it may be easier than what any of the other slaves do there is the hostile element of that the white people, who are uneasy around her anyway, can get away with doing whatever they want to her, whenever they want. This leaves Dana in a position in which she has to be constantly vigilant which can be taxing mentally and is not a good situation to have deep thought in. However, Dana having to rely so much on instinct really helped make the book more enjoyable to read because it felt a lot more relatable or Dana's actions felt a lot more understandable. There were times like when she was hidden behind white patrollers, armed with a knife, and she could have gone Rambo and murdered him while he was alone with Alice and her mother or something. But even though some might think that's a smart thing to do to protect them, it makes total sense that's not what was going through Dana's mind given her situation. Also the book was pretty easy to read which was nice since the story was interesting, it was well written and pretty much just laid out what happened, and any more abstract concepts were pretty easily gotten it seemed in class discussions. Blog posts flow a lot better than I thought, I now have a text block, and like 6 more of these to write :).