I adore Kindred! The only Butler I had read prior to that one was "Parable of the Sower", and while it was very well-written, it was so goddawful depressing that it took me a long time (much too long!) to try any of her other books.

The thing about Carnival is that it's going to be really, really easy to write up, because I wrote a bunch of emails to naye after finishing it -- I had a lot of things I really liked about the book, and a couple of things I really didn't like (one of which was, yes, that I found the main characters very uninteresting, though the supporting cast was quite awesome), and I've got all those thoughts nicely written out in emails already, so all I have to do is find the emails and work them up into a post.