Time travel done well. A 1970s California bride, Dana, is called back in time -- time after time -- to save the life of the son of a Maryland antebellum, slave-holding plantation owner. Dana is the Black half of interracial newlyweds, and each time she is called into the past, she stays longer, confronts the way she is adapting to life under the lash and the hard choices she has to make to survive and to protect those she loves. ( )

Kindred is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. It is a harrowing and enduring work of art that remains a highly important book in the American canon of literature. This Locus/Bram Stoker award winning adaptation in graphic novel form is highly stylized but remains to true to Butler's narrative masterpiece. I found John Jenning's renderings to be tense but often a bit confusing which is appropriate for a tale of disorienting time travel. ( )

The graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece Kindred is a #1 New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium.

Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler’s mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century.

Butler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a Southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him.

Held up as an essential work in feminist, science-fiction, and fantasy genres, as well as a cornerstone of the Afrofuturism movement, the intersectionality of race, history, and the treatment of women addressed in the book still remain critical topics in contemporary dialogue, both in the classroom and in the public sphere.

Frightening, compelling, and richly imagined, Kindred offers an unflinching look at our complicated social history, transformed by the graphic novel format into a visually stunning work for a new generation of readers.

-Amazon description

Seemed to me more a badly illustrated abridgement than a graphic novel. ( )

Harrowing and multilayered. Now I want to read the original novel even more. ( )