Juneteenth Book Club

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. (“You have to read them.”)
The New York Times best-selling author’s time-travel classic that makes us feel the horrors of American slavery and indicts our country’s lack of progress on racial reconciliation
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.
Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).

(From the publisher Penguin Random House)

Octavia E. Butler was an influential African American science fiction writer born in Pasadena, California, in 1947. She began her writing journey at a young age after feeling dissatisfied with the stories she encountered, notably after watching the film "Devil Girl from Mars." Butler's literary career officially began with her first published story in 1971, and her first novel, "Patternmaster," was released in 1976, marking the beginning of her acclaimed Patternist series. Throughout her career, she addressed complex themes of gender, race, and sexuality, particularly through her notable works such as "Wild Seed," "Lilith's Brood," and the "Parable" series, which depicted dystopian futures and explorations of human relationships.

(From EBSCO.com)

If you haven't attended our book club before, we welcome you to make this your first visit. We know you will become a regular. For adults only. Refreshments provided. Please note that we do not meet the third Saturday of the month during summer as we are cloesed.

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Host or Publisher Elmwood | Detroit Public Library