Octavia Butler's prologue and first chapter of Kindred left me with the best emotions that I felt throughout the entire novel. I loved how right from the beginning Butler grabbed my attention with a very complex and ambiguous prologue. The excitement of Dana losing her arm inside a wall, or essentially between two time periods, is sufficient enough to reel any reader into the story line. Right from the get-go, I found myself with tons of unanswered questions. I was dying to know more about Kevin and Dana, and especially the "trip" Dana had embarked on that ultimately resulted in a dismembered arm.

Kindred's first chapter, "The River", doesn't exactly present the character descriptions that I was hoping to receive. I can collect that Dana and Kevin are a couple moving into a new home together. Both characters seem very likable, as well as intellectual. As much as I'd like to know a little more about Kevin and Dana, Butler obviously isn't interested in lengthy analyses. By the second page of the "The River," the book's theme of time travel is presented when Dana passes out and finds herself in the antebellum South. This is her first and perhaps one of her most exciting encounters with the Weylins. She enters the past only to find a young boy, better known as Rufus, drowning in a river. After Dana saves his life, she is repaid by having a rifle pointed at her face just before she travels back to the present. In resemblance to the prologue, this scenario was exciting, yet very vague. Now that I've been introduced to Rufus and two other main characters, I can begin to piece together the unanswered questions about the "trips" Dana takes. At the end of the chapter, I find myself very anxious to see where Dana will end up on her next transportation to the past. I'm almost certain that when she travels back again to the 1800s that her encounter will include the same characters from her previous journey. I'm not quite sure if she will return to Rufus in the same year that she has just met him.

On a side note, I found it very interesting that time passes at two completely different speeds when comparing the past and the present in Kindred. Her first encounter in the South takes a few minutes, while in 1976, or the present, she is gone for merely seconds. This differentiation proved to futher help me in keeping a clear contrast between the 19th and 20th century.