for emerging film and television writers. The mother of three amazing children, Pace lives with her husband in Los Angeles, and when not writing she likes to lace up her cleats and get all her ya-yas out on the soccer field.
The Once and Future Me is her first novel.
At CrimeReads Pace tagged five favorite speculative fiction novels with feminist themes, including:
Octavia Butler, KindredRead about the other novels on Pace's list at CrimeReads.
The story of Dana, a black woman from 1976 who finds herself being pulled back in time, again and again, to antebellum Maryland to save the life of her abusive white ancestor, Rufus, so that she and the rest of his descendants don’t flicker out of existence.
A book Butler called “a kind of grim fantasy,” where she “set out to make people feel history,” Kindred shines a light on the power dynamicsof antebellum slavery, in particular, the brutal calculations and choices it forced its female victims to make in order to survive.
All of this is seen through Dana’s twentieth-century eyes and sensibility, making for a gut-wrenching experience as she’s compelled to make increasingly painful compromises to her autonomy in order to preserve her bloodline and stay alive long enough to get back to her own time.
By the end of the book, Butler has redefined heroism in terms of persistence, survival and escape, and enduring as the ultimate denial of victimization. And if that weren’t enough, Butler’s dialogue just moves, and her prose is so lyrical, I like to dip into it from time to time, like a warm bath of inspiration.
Kindred is among Caroline O'Donoghue's top ten lost women's classics.
--Marshal Zeringue
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