Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE • WINNER OF THE PEN / HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION • Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

• ISBN10: 1101971061
• ISBN13: 9781101971062
• Publish Date: 2 May 2017 (first published 7 June 2016)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 320
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781101971062

Reviews

[mrs_mander_reads]

So good. Definitely a perspective I needed on African Americans, Ghanians, POC, etc. I don't know nearly enough about their history.

[nannah]

"Homegoing" is less a novel (as it says on the cover) than a connected series of short stories covering two lines of ancestors stemming from one single woman: Maame, from Ghana.

Book content warnings:
slavery
rape
n slur
abuse (domestic and in so many other ways)
cr*pple slur

I've never read anything like this. It covers three hundred years, beginning in Ghana, and splitting to become an American story as well. Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are Maame's daughters who live in two different villages in Ghana. And that's where their stories diverge. Esi is sold as a slave and shipped to America, while Effia stays in Ghana.

Esi's children are born into slavery in America, and her line continues through the Civil War, jazz clubs, dope houses, coal mines, etc., right up to contemporary America. And Effia's ancestors in Ghana deal with wars between the Fante and Asante nations--not to mention all the while struggling with British colonization.

I'm not going to lie, this book was ... heavy. Hard to read during several parts (maybe most of the book?), but it was ultimately worth it. Will I read it again? Maybe not, but I don't regret reading it.

Every character is uniquely interesting, flawed, real, and compelling. Even when I disliked someone, I still wanted to read more about their story. Yaa Gyasi is an incredible character writer. Each character is also somehow connected to every person that came before them, somehow haunted, maybe. One line of the ancestry with fire, one line with water. And at the end, they meet together in the Most satisfying way!

This is the shortest review ever, and I told you maybe nothing of my actual opinions on it, but that's okay. It took me a couple days to even write this much. It wasn't even the "heaviest" of books, but I can't really gather my thoughts here. The writing is wonderful, and the whole book is constructed in a beautiful, impactful way. I guess that's enough.

[Heather]

This was not what I was expecting. I had been putting it off because even though everyone loved it, I had gotten the impression that this was a heavy literary novel. It isn't that at all. It is pretty standard historical fiction. (That's a good thing in my world.)

Two half-sisters in Ghana start the story. One stays in Ghana and marries a British man. The other is sold into slavery by that British man. One member of each generation tells their story up until the present.

Everyone is right. It really is good. Go read it.

[clementine]

This is a hugely ambitious book telling the story of eight generations of two lineages descended from one woman - one in Ghana and one in the United States. It grapples with issues both small and massive: from family dynamics to arranged marriage to slavery and colonialism. The characters are drawn beautifully (complex, flawed, and sympathetic) and Gyasi particularly excels at describing places as well as dealing with the passage of time. Her descriptions of the 1700s are just as convincing as the early 2000s. I found that the prose could lack fluidity, and I wished I could have spent more time with some of the characters. Each gets only one chapter, and the chapters can feel more like short stories or vignettes than part of a novel. Most of the characters were fascinating and could have carried a whole novel.

[jamiereadthis]

It feels like this was written to be required reading in high school— and not in the bad way, where you hold an eternal grudge against an author because you were forced to read them for grades. It’s a primer on the narratives that get willfully erased, spanning generations of America’s (and Britain’s, and humanity’s) evils. You know, all the stuff you’re NOT taught in school.

Ultimately, as is sometimes the case, its upsides are also its downsides, when it spans those generations at the cost of nuanced, complicated characters that would make me feel the story even more deeply. But what it does, it does well. Beyond well. I only hope this has a future on a lot of must-read lists, young and old.

[inlibrisveritas]

So much love for this one.

Review to come