This was such an intense book. I have never been this on edge for this many pages at a time when reading, which speaks to Butler’s ability to build tension and dread in this novel about slavery. We follow the first person perspective of 26-year-old Dana who one day is suddenly yanked from 1976 to the early 1800s, where she helps a drowning boy. Soon after she time travels back to her home and her husband Kevin to find that only seconds had passed. This travel occurs several more times, each time precipitated by the boy, Rufus, needing her life-saving help in some way as he grows up. And each time she returns home to find that only minutes or hours had passed, even though months may have passed in the alternate timeline. When she is back in the 1800s, she is on a plantation in Maryland and essentially has to play the role of a slave to get by.
I was anxious every time Dana was called back to Rufus because I didn’t know what bad things would happen to her or when. The owner of the plantation isn’t as brutal as Dana’s husband expected him to be (“this place isn’t what I would have imagined. No overseers. No more work than the people can manage. . .”), but it’s still a slave-run plantation with plenty of brutality of all kinds. Butler’s spare prose doesn’t dwell voyeuristically on the violence, but readers see it happening and dread its happening again. Butler masterfully evokes tension and anger—anger towards everyone, even Dana sometimes; I would get angry with a risk she was taking but also sometimes angry when she didn’t resist, while fully understanding why she didn’t resist.
Part of this anger comes from the fact that while I said that Dana has to play the role of a slave, that’s not entirely accurate. For all intents and purposes, she is a slave. She’s treated differently and often better than the other slaves, but she still has to watch herself, and she still gets in trouble that results in violence against her. There’s a point where she recognizes that “Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot we were acting.” While it’s not explicitly stated, this does seem to change for Dana. That particular time, she had gone back with Kevin, and it added a layer of protection because he is white and could pretend to be her owner. Life was still dangerous but not nearly as much as when he wasn’t there. I think that by the end, she was a little bit in both worlds, both an actor/observer and absorbed into the reality of that timeline.
There are trigger warnings aplenty for this book, but it’s also brilliant and emotionally evocative. 4.5 stars rounded up. I’m looking forward to reading more of Butler’s work, especially the works that are more overtly science fiction.