Title: Homegoing           

Author: Yaa Gyasi           

Genre: Historical Fiction        

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf         

Format: Hardcover 

Pages: 320 

Rating: 5/5 stars 

Synopsis (Goodreads):

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. 

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.

Review:

Wow I can’t believe it took me so long to read this book! I should have read this book a long time ago, because every time someone is talking about this book, they are raving about it!

–

Alright, so Homegoing follows two women from Africa who are half sisters, but they don’t know it, and it follows their descendants story throughout history! One side stays in Africa, in what becomes Ghana, and follows their families throughout history and how they were impacted by slavery, how they are trying to find their place amongst the different groups within the area etc. The other storyline follows the descendants of a women who was captured and sold into slavery in the United States, and the horrifying experiences they encountered in slavery, as well as after slavery with racial tension, the movement up North from Jim Crow South, and their descendants trying to make sense of what happened to their family! 

–

The writing is absolutely amazing! I was totally sucked in, and was disappointed almost every time when the characters switched because the author did an amazing job of hooking me to the characters in about 30 pages! I love reading an inter generational story, where the book follows a family through multiple generations! The book dealt with so many important issues, including the harsh abuses of slavery, but also the African response to slavery on the continent, the tensions between groups of people in Africa, as well as how different families can be when you grow up in different areas, with different family histories! I tried to think of it from a sociological perspective, and it was so interesting! Highly recommend this book! 

Happy reading!