Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

HOMEGOING by Yaa Gyasi follows an extended family over the span of three hundred years in Ghana and America. The journey begins in two different villages in the 18th C in Ghana. One half-sister, Esi, is imprisoned in a castle dungeon, sold into slavery, shipped off to America, and it is here her family saga begins: from the plantations in the South to the Civil War to the Great Migration to the dope houses and jazz clubs in Harlem to the present day. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the Cape Coast Castle in her native Ghana, where centuries of warfare between the Fante and Asante nations challenge its very foundation, and also where the challenges of British colonization and the slave trade emerge. This is perhaps the best novel about slavery, racism, identity, culture and warfare I have read in a very long time. The family saga is amazing as you watch each generation emerge with its own set of struggles against the backdrop of various historical moments. The writing is crisp and clean and beautiful. The narrative made me rage and weep concurrently.


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