Time Travel? Thanks for the curveball Kindred.

This novel was far more scintillating than I assumed when I first picked it up.  The aspect of the novel that intrigued me the most was the two periods in time.  This was a style of writing I was unfamiliar with but it was very refreshing.  A graduate student studying for her master's described Butler's writing as a palimpsest for her thesis and I am starting to agree with her.  Some would consider "Kindred" a science fiction novel but I feel as if this novel cannot be contained within one genre.  A palimpsest described from dictionary.com states "a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next."  In the case of "Kindred" the 1976 would be the bottom layer and 1815 would be the top layer.  Each layer being carefully interwoven with each other.  After hearing this, I believe this novel cannot simply be read for face value.  There are countless points of interest to discuss within this novel such as the aforementioned genre or even how the novel mirror's Frederick Douglass' own narrative.  In short, this novel is certainly intriguing due to the successful blending of history, science fiction, and fantasy.