Wow! I was honestly expecting this book to be awful to read just because Professor Arnold said that we should not wait until the last second to read this book because it was more mature reading. I was terrified to read the book, expecting it to be extremely boring and have a terrible plot line, but man was it interesting. I really have to give credit to the author for figuring out time traavel and making it sound realistic. I have been in writing classes before where students try to use time travel in their works of writing and they usually have so many flaws in the logic that they have to start from scratch and scrap the time travel idea. Butler on the other hand, to me, did an excellent job of keeping the concept of time travel legitimate. I'm not really sure why, because I normally have zero trouble with this, but keeping up with all of the names within the book was a bit of a challenge for me. I for some reason had a hard time remembering who Mister Weylin was and then they would call him Tom and I would be all confused. I normally have no issue with this, but this book really got me tripped up sometimes. If some day the school I teach at has the English classes broken into different reading levels, I would absolutely teach this to my advanced reading class. As we had spoke about in class, I feel it was excellent to read a book that was steeped in slavery before reading this book. I feel that really helped me understand some "customs" or "proper" ways for slaves to act. Also, I feel as though I should have known more about the geography of the land and the time period's history before reading this book so that I feel as though teaching some things such as that would be excellent framing activities for the book.
The one flaw I found with this book (which may not be a flaw at all) was that at times, the language did not seem to feel right. The slaves would comment on Dana's speech and how she didn't sound like anyone they had heard before, but at the same time the slaves didn't have horrible speech either. I feel as though reading the other book first maybe gave a skewed version of the language or maybe just a version that was specific to that particular plantation.
Overall, I was well pleased with this book and would definitely use it in my classroom.
I hadn't really thought about that aspect of Dana's dialogue versus slaves' dialogue until I read your blog entry. You are right that there are times when the 1819 people comment on Dana's speech but then their speech seems to be no different than Dana's. An interesting observation on your part! I do wonder now if Butler was aware that was happening. I guess I always just figured it was her accent or something that was throwing other people off. Huh, interesting. Like you, I also expected the book to be uber-complicated and was wary about delving into it. In the end, I liked how the book turned out. I am still a little confused as to how Dana's arm gets stuck in the wall, but no matter. I do wonder why her left arm? In my blog, I suggested symbolism there, but can't quite figure out what kind. Seeing as how the first line of the book deals with how on her last trip she lost her arm, "my left arm," there has to be something to that.
ReplyDeleteGreat point about the dialogue between the slaves and Dana. There were some issues with the dialogue in general, like we discussed in class. Butler is an amazing writer, but her focus with this novel seemed to be in the creation of a mixed genre book. While she does this, there is a lack of finesse in certain areas. I think this comes out in the dialogue and also in the time travel. There are some inconsistencies in the function of the time travel, but that can pretty easily be overlooked.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post!
-Allison
Interesting catch on the language... I think some writers forget to write in the vernacular. In this book it would have been doubly difficult because there are two different time periods! Kindred is farther ahead in time than Copper Sun was, but I agree that the language would have been different in reality.
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