by Vipasha Bansal 

“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

This is how the story of Dana begins in Kindred, my first Octavia Butler novel. I read these words on a bus, home-bound from New York. I had heard of this author and knew to expect some mystery, some fantasy, some unreal sort of stuff. What I did not expect was something quite physically strange. These first words that Butler had spoken to me sent chills down my left arm. Because believe it or not, in the seat in front of me sat a woman without a left arm.

Unusual for both a book and a bus, yet each had a woman with a missing left arm. I suddenly had the feeling that everything around me was imagined. This is how Butler had me, so to speak, at hello.

There are so many…