I think most, if not all of us expected Kevin to be much different when he came back after 5 years stuck in the past. I thought his survival instincts would outweigh his conscience and would just get used to the atrocities of slavery around him. When he came back he was disoriented and frustrated by how difficult it was to relearn modern technology, like his typewriter, but he was still pretty much the same Kevin. I'm honestly glad that Butler didn't make him change that much. I feel like that would be too obvious and cliche. I think that this is what I liked the most about the book: the plot wasn't that obvious.
I think that by making us wonder how much Kevin will change, just to have him remain the same old Kevin, Butler diverts our attention away from Dana. We all knew that Dana was going to change a lot. Her position is way different that Kevin's. However, I feel like by diverting our attention to Kevin's development (or lack of), Butler makes Dana's change even more obvious and drastic than I had expected. Along with this, the way that Butler sets up each of Dana's encounters with Rufus, I never got the sense that she could kill him, even after Hagar is born. She knows that Rufus has (and probably will continue) to do unforgivable things, but she still sees the boy she saved during her first encounter. She also seemed to want to find some redeeming quality in him. It's obviously hard for her to accept that he is her ancestor and can be such bad person. Even at the very end she was very hesitant to kill him, and I still wasn't sure whether or not she would actually do it.
I think that Butler did a very good job at keeping the book spontaneous. She's able to make it spontaneous by diverting attention and by being spontaneous in a more subtle way, rather than just doing a hard 180 and leaving the reader completely confused.
