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Jan 2021
10:39pm, 18 Jan 2021
44,460 posts
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LindsD
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Jan 2021
10:42pm, 18 Jan 2021
20,444 posts
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Serendippily
Would it be possible to have the main book group in related threads please? I often want to return to the thread from whence I came
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Jan 2021
10:45pm, 18 Jan 2021
794 posts
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Peregrinator
Oops that confused the algorithm. The Veet for men thread now shows:
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Jan 2021
10:52pm, 18 Jan 2021
35,285 posts
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Night-owl
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Jan 2021
11:26am, 19 Jan 2021
20,777 posts
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Columba
Please, someone enlighten me. Who/what are these taggers? Are they just parts of the website's algorithms?
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Jan 2021
7:03pm, 19 Jan 2021
20,449 posts
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Serendippily
There’s a team of genuine people who responded to a call out from Fetch Columba to add tags to all the threads so the related threads group correctly. I’m really enjoying their work it looks really smart
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Jan 2021
9:13am, 20 Jan 2021
4,735 posts
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westmoors
I finished this last night.
I liked the concept of having to save your ancestor to ensure your own existence.
I wasn't convinced Dana's 'suicide' attempt should have brought her back to 1976. I don't think the fear of dying would be the same when self-inflicted.
In some ways it was quite disturbing, but in others, very enjoyable. I gave it a 9.
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Jan 2021
9:04pm, 20 Jan 2021
20,780 posts
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Columba
Agreed, Westmoors. About self-inflicted dying being different from death arriving uninvited.
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Jan 2021
6:51pm, 24 Jan 2021
17,144 posts
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Chrisull
Once you'd swallowed the unlikely and indigestible plot logic (Dana and Rufus are somehow bound to each other, so Rufus can summon her when in mortal danger, and Dana can only return when the same is true for her), it was a gripping white knuckle ride into pre Civil War American lives and attitudes. The text was shorn of any stylistic quirks as if they would distract from the central message, which is less than 200 years ago, we treated those of a different colour skin as if they were subhuman. We are comstantly, jabbed and jostled with the close proximity of this throughout, how the towns are the same, the roads are the same, the people are close ancestors - so much so that Dana returns with a map, which she is co-erced into destroying, looks them up in graveyards and public records.
Dana's character is also constantly remind of how soft she is compared to the real slaves in the story line, but as Dio pointed out elsewhere, you start fearing how much more suffering and opprobrium can be heaped upon her each time she starts feeling dizzy, so is it she who is soft, or we the reader who are? While ostensibly fiction, there is so much fact - what happens to slaves when they rebel, what happens to them when their master dies, how children are routinely sold off, that it isn't escapist in the way fiction normally is.
An obvious touchstone is Time Traveller's Wife , but this neglects the text that this book borrowed from so heavily which was Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan", although perhaps a closer connection can be argued for Slaughterhouse Five where Vonnegut's retelling of the firebombing in Dresden in reverse (borrowed and extended by Martin Amis for Time's Arrow), enables us to confront the true horrors at somewhat distant and safer standpoint, here Butler does the same for usm and indeed the ending can only be muted, because the only logical release is that Dana kills Rufus, thus condemning the other slaves to being sold and losing the homes that they have built (remember Nigel's hadn built house?). Ultimately Dana is able to go home and forget the suffering and misery she has inadvertently caused, just as we can too.
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Jan 2021
9:36am, 25 Jan 2021
56,935 posts
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Diogenes
I feel like I might be the one dissenting voice here, but I really didn't think very much of this book at all. I found it unconvincing as either a time-travel adventure or a book about race and quickly bored of it. Although it was quite a quick read I often went days without picking up because there was usually something more interesting to do. I found the characters of Dana and Kevin very sketchily drawn and I didn't care about them in any way.
Maybe Butler had to tone things down, but Dana's experiences in the past were neither cruel nor violent enough. I expect she would have been killed on her first or second visit as a witch, long before Rufus ever developed any affection for her.
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