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.
I agree, Butler finds a great balance between being spontaneous and unpredictable but also creating really important and solid character growth. I was a bit taken aback when I first started the book and a bit put-off because the writing style seemed a bit "typical popular YA" in the first chapter, which was very different from the other books we had read in the class. However, it ended up developing a lot throughout the book and I definitely can't imagine the book having been written in any other way.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this book was pretty spontaneous, it was hard to figure out whether Kevin would stay into a good guy or completely turn and betray Dana. I think the spontaneous aspect of the book really gave readers a realistic picture of the situation.
ReplyDeleteOne subtle way in which Kevin does seem to be altered by his experiences in the past has to do with the naivete he voices that day with Dana, when he says that traveling out west would be pretty sweet, and she reminds him of the violence against Native Americans (essentially, "don't be too quick to romanticize the past!"). With his scar on his forehead and his prematurely aged appearance, there's the sense that whatever Kevin has seen has changed him, and he no longer speaks so lightly about the prospect of "time-travel tourism."
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