I’m having some trouble pinning my thoughts on this book. I enjoyed it and liked Erlick’s weaving in of injustice, it feels very on the nose for a world that recently experienced a pandemic. 

This book feels like it was written yesterday, not almost 50 years ago. And that is perhaps what makes it so masterful. Butler ties us to the past in a timeless way. Dana is yanked back in time but is also living in a moment fresh off the heels of the civil rights movement and still experiences racism in her modern life. Throwing her back into 1815 puts her in a position to understand more deeply the generational trauma her family has endured, and perhaps explains the attitudes of characters like her uncle. 

Kevin’s character in this book is interesting, Butler wrote Dana’s husband to be a white author who goes back with her in one of the trips back to 1815, and he gets left behind for a number of years while there. During his 5 year stint he becomes an abolitionist and teacher. 

Rufus’s character is perhaps the most well crafted of Butler’s in this story. Writing him from the age of four to twenty-five. Dana believes she can influence him to be kinder and treat the enslaved with more humanity. But the antebellum south and its mindset wins out. Rufus is a product of his time, the way his foil, Kevin, is a product of his. Despite having some “good” moments, like freeing his children, Rufus is ultimately a deeply flawed and dangerous person who has little regard for the other humans in his life because they are slaves. Dana, despite trying to change him, figures out in the end that he will never change, and does the one thing she can to save herself. 

In the end, Dana’s choice to save herself is a reflection of 1815 runaways. She knows her choice has the consequences of harming the other enslaved on the plantation and yet she still chooses herself. She lives with that weight everyday going forward, and struggles bearing it. Kevin tries to convince her it is okay, but they will never know the results of her choices as they are lost to history. 

The ending felt representative of how many Black Americans are unable to learn about their ancestry due to lack of record keeping, destroying records and illiteracy from their families. Despite Dana’s physical connection to Rufus and his children, she still does not know where they end up after her choice to kill Rufus. Despite trying to find answers, she’s left with more questions. All she knows, is they survived long enough to have children; but how did they live their life? As slaves? Or as the free children Rufus promised they’d be. Dana will never know. 

I think the Titanic pull of this book was really just for marketing purposes because it didn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of the plot.

Ultimately what made this book 4 stars for me was how Schaffert talks about language, and books, and words just generally. There’s a sentence in the book that I saved because I loved it so much “I love words as much as I do the stories they tell. I can lose myself in the shape of a letter, the shade of the ink. I can get caught up in the twists of an ampersand.” And moments like that is what made me enjoy this story. 

Anahid was like the only part of this book that kept me going because I was interested in her story… the rest was not as captivating to me as I would have liked

I struggle to rate classics because it always feels like there’s immense pressure to like them. But this one feels easy to rate at a 3.5. There are certainly parts that are good, and the overall message of stripping individuality and all that is done well. But god, I was bored.

I’m not sure why with how emotionally devastating this book was that the moments that really got me were Richard’s friendship with Jude. 

Riordan knows how to write a nostalgia book, that’s for sure