Kindred by Octavia Butler

Kindred by Octavia Butler is an outstanding sci-fi novel published in 1979. It has been around a long time but this is the first time I've read it. The story is about Dana, a black woman who is transported back in time to save the life of one of her ancestors. This is complicated because the ancestor is a young, white boy, the son of a plantation owner in the Antebellum South. Dana does not have papers designating her as a freed slave so she has some extreme problems. These problems are sometimes compounded and sometimes alleviated by the fact that she is a highly educated woman in a time and place when most blacks were prevented from learning to read.

Dana goes back and forth between her ancestor's time and her own. She may spend months in the past then return to find she's only been gone for a few days. Yet anything that happens to her physically in either time period remains, including scars from a brutal whipping.

In many ways the book reminded me of the song from South Pacific with the line, “You've got to be taught to hate and fear...” For this reason this book is relevant to the discussions we are having today about systemic racism. Butler presents us readers with people who were not born filled with hatred but instead conformed to the horrible norms of the day. This is true among both the whites and blacks in her book. Even Dana is changed somewhat after living in a society where slavery is accepted.

Apparently, Kindred is in pre-production for an FX series. That should be great but I recommend reading the book first.

The Garden of Happy Endings by Barbara O’Neal

I read The Garden of Happy Endings because it was recommended to me by Goodreads. I suppose that was because I had read and enjoyed a couple of novels by Gail Godwin: Father Melancholy's Daughter and Evensong. All three of these books treat priests/ministers in a realistic manner, exposing their flaws but also telling of their struggles to make the world a better place.

The Garden of Happy Endings has a few elements that touch on the mystical side of Christianity: angels, ghosts (human and animal) and callings but that isn't the core of the book. It's about living one's life with faith. That includes losing faith when tragedy or personal disappointment strikes. It also includes having faith fill a void created by loss.

This novel is listed in three categories on Amazon: Women's Divorce Fiction, Sisters Fiction and Women's Sagas. The latter two are obvious. The first less so because there is no actual divorce in the plot. There are, however, three women who split from their partners for different reasons and react to their separations in different ways.

The male characters in the novel are less developed than the females, which makes sense since the book is written from the points of view of the three women: Elsa (a minister going through a faith crisis), Tamsin (Elsa's sister) and Alexa (Tamsin's daughter). They all have stories worth telling.

I recommend this book for anyone looking for a good story of faith and its power to help deal with tragedy and broken relationships.