This novel starts off on June 9, 1976, in California with an African American Girl named Dana on her 26th birthday with her husband Kevin and are moving into their new home. Kevin has started to unpack his office and Dana is unpacking books. Then Kevin walks out of the office to talk to Dana when Dana all of a sudden starts to get dizzy and Dana then finds herself in a grove of trees thats in the late 1800’s in the state of Maryland by a nearby river when she spots a young boy drowning named Rufus. She then goes into the river to save the unconscious boy. Once the boy has came back to life and she dealt with his mother she reappears back into her apartment. Several minutes later she begins to feel dizzy again and then disappears.
This time Dana finds herself sees Rufus, now a few years older, with his bedroom drapes on fire. Dana then puts out the fire and helps Rufus escape the house. She then runs to the house of Alice Greenwood and her mother. She then gets caught up when a group of white men smash down the door and beat down Alice’s husband and a man tries to rape her but bef...
On a drive on Highway 50, through Nevada to see a real ghost town, Agnes finds a little girl named Rebecca who has been separated by her family who was looking Leister 's gold. The capper of the whole thing is that Agnes saw the whole thing in a dream, but she gets to the Goldberg Hotel and Saloon, she realizes the whole thing was real, especially the inside of her room. She soon finds out that the entire hotel is haunted by all kinds of spirits from past guests; which only serves to make Agnes 's vacation that much more interesting. She wants to find out what happened to the family. She knows with every fiber of her being that it was not just a dream, and that a little girl really did go missing in the night before Agnes showed up. Will they be able to find the missing kid or will a killer (called “The Cutter”) ruin their
The book Blind, written by Rachel DeWoskin, is about a highschool sophomore named Emma, who went blind after being struck in the face with a firework. When she first lost her sight, Emma was placed in a hospital for over 2 months, and once she was released, she could finally go home again. DeWoskin uses the characterization of Emma throughout the beginning of the text to help the reader understand the character’s struggle more. Especially in the first few chapters, it was difficult for Emma to adapt to a world without sight. For instance, DeWoskin writes, “And sat down, numb, on our gold couch. And tried to open my eyes, rocked, counted my legs and arms and fingers. I didn’t cry. Or talk” (DeWoskin 44). As a result of losing a very important scent, she’s started to act differently from a person with sight.
Dana is pulled back into the past whenever Rufus is faced with a life or death situation. On her first trip back into time, Dana finds Rufus drowning in a river. She pulls him out safely and begins to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation. Rufus’ mother, who saw the whole thing, begins hitting Dana while screaming, “You killed my baby!” (Butler 14). A few moments later Dana comes to face her first racial encounter with Tom Weylin. She turns to face the end of a long barrel of a shotgun. Almost immediately Dana becomes dizzy and passes out to wake up in her and Kevin’s home in California.
The human brain has great power and abilities, some of which we fail to realize it uses every day of our lives. This can be exemplified by our brain’s ability to create mental shortcuts by assigning labels to what is around us. Although this skill is typically good and helpful to us, “[it] can also be extremely damaging, especially when it comes to categorizing people” (Kaufman). This statement’s validity true enough that novelists have noticed and incorporated it into their work to raise awareness. Different authors have incorporated this into their work such as Barbara Kingsolver and John Irving. The novel that will be analyzed specifically is by Octavia Butler called Kindred. It is a 1979 novel of an independent, African-American woman who travels back through time to save her kin from death during the time of slavery. The analysis of this novel will present examples of labeling, the rejection of labeling, and real life commentary as it
Kindred by Octavia Butler has been a respected novel since its publication in 1979. In Kindred Butler provides readers with suspense until the last page. It provides readers with two definitions of a home. Home is a place where you feel safe where you have a family to come to when you are having a horrible day at work or at school. Home is a place where you share good and bad times with family and friends. A home is place of stability in your life. A home isn’t a place that you are scared to go to. A home isn’t a place filled with only negative thoughts and hopes. A home is not a place that you endured physical and mental abuse. Dana had a home of stability and a home filled with physical and mental abuse. Dana and her husband Kevin just moved into a new home that they just bought in Los Angeles, California. This is the best birthday gift she could ever receive because before she was living in a congested apartment. This is also the first day she starts to travel back into time to visit her plantation home in the early 1800s in Maryland. The distinctions between Los Angeles and Maryland present the differences in what makes a home.
Cara Sierra Skyes has a hard role in Perfect by Ellen Hopkins. Cara is in love with her boyfriend Sean, she describes him as fun, good-looking, adventurous, and a jock. Everyone expects the perfect girl to go out with the perfect guy. Caras mom has always taught her, appearances are everything. So, Cara held onto that. She is a pretty and popular cheerleader. Cara holds a special trait, she is actually really smart and has a scholarship lined up at Stanford. Problem is, Cara has a twin brother, Connor. Connor is super suicidal and has tried many times to kill himself, sadly one day he succeeds and leaves a girlfriend and his family behind in his high school years. So everything is definitely not the idea her parents have of “perfect”. At Least she tries. Cara is in love with her boyfriend Sean but she starts to spark an interest for a girl at the ski slopes one day and she becomes very confused. Between dealing with all her school activities, her grades, and her brother that she worries about all the time, Cara is struggling to keep her life together and be
The book follows Dana who is thrown back in time to live in a plantation during the height of slavery. The story in part explores slavery through the eye of an observer. Dana and even Kevin may have been living in the past, but they were not active members. Initially, they were just strangers who seemed to have just landed in to an ongoing play. As Dana puts it, they "were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors." (Page 98). The author creates a scenario where a woman from modern times finds herself thrust into slavery by account of her being in a period where blacks could never be anything else but slaves. The author draws a picture of two parallel times. From this parallel setting based on what Dana goes through as a slave and her experiences in the present times, readers can be able to make comparison between the two times. The reader can be able to trace how far perceptions towards women, blacks and family relations have come. The book therefore shows that even as time goes by, mankind still faces the same challenges, but takes on a reflection based on the prevailing period.
In most relationships, friendship or sexual, trust is one of the main aspects that determine whether or not the relationship will last. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, relationships are a major topic. Specifically, one that involves two different races which was never a big factor until time travel introduces them to the antebellum south. The trust Kevin and Dana displays shifts due to the novum of time travel and the way they view their own relationship in modern day 1970 to the antebellum south.
Abolutionist, Fredrick Douglass once stated, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”().
The novel is set in the near future in Gilead, formerly the U.S., at a time when the population rate is rapidly declining. A religious regime has taken over, and women are used as breeders to boost the declining birth rate among the Caucasian race. Women are owned by men and are breeders. In the New World Order love doesnít exist, but the act of love is the only form of intimacy.
This book tells the story of a young girl named Deja Barnes, who lives in New York City with her younger brother and sister
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, is a novel about an African American woman named Dana (born in 1950) who lives in 1976 California. She experiences weird headaches and dizziness one day and gets teleported to a river in the woods. She sees a boy drowning and rushes into the river to save him. The boy’s mother comes out yelling at Dana and then the father comes out with a shotgun just as Dana is sent back to her house. Dana kinda sees it as a hallucination and goes on shocked. Later she experiences the dizziness again and is sent back to a house this time. Then she finds out she is being sent to the past to help her relative Rufus from dying. Every time Rufus gets in trouble to the point of dying Dana is flung back in time to save him. But she is sent to the 1800s
In the featured article, “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” the author, Judith Butler, writes about her views on what it means to be considered human in society. Butler describes to us the importance of connecting with others helps us obtain the faculties to feel, and become intimate through our will to become vulnerable. Butler contends that with the power of vulnerability, the rolls pertaining to humanity, grief, and violence, are what allows us to be acknowledged as worthy.
The scene started when Dana walked into the barn where once she had been whipped. She tried to get used to the darkness. After a few seconds, she saw someone hanging by the neck. The person hanging was Alice. Dana looked at her and touched her not believing what she was seeing. She looked at Alice's dress, shoes and hair. Dana thought that Alice had dressed up for her death. Dana cut the rope to take her down. Rufus finally walked in. He did not want to look at Dana. Dana asked Rufus if she did it that to herself and he answered yes. Then, Dana asked him for the reason but she did not get an answer. She desired to ask about Alice's children. Rufus moved his head and walked out of the bard.
Barren Ground by Ellen Glasgow follows the life of Dorinda Oakley, a poor girl living in a desolate town in Virginia. At the beginning of Barren Ground, twenty-year old Dorinda Oakley lives with her family in the town of Broomsedge. She dreams of escaping her farm house for a life in New York when she meets the son of the village doctor, Jason Greylock, and almost instantly, she develops feelings for him. He becomes the “object of her passion” (Bunch). But when she loses him, her life is forever changed. In Ellen Glasgow’s novel Barren Ground, the main character Dorinda Oakley leaves her life of poverty in order to pursue her dream of happiness and in her journey experiences love, loss, and despair.