Homegoing

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Fiction
2016 Alfred A. Knopf
Finished on July 5, 2017
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

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.

I read Homegoing for my new book club here in Oregon and had I read it simply for my personal enjoyment, I don't think I would've finished (or even read past page 50). The structure of the book deals with two branches of one family for a total of seven generations. Each chapter reads like a short story and while they are all loosely connected, there is no sense of cohesiveness when one reaches the final page. There were a few chapters that I enjoyed more than others and I found myself wishing for more time with those characters, but they disappeared once their chapter concluded. Maybe this would be a good book to read in a literature class, but I was confused about who was who and how they were related to the people in previous chapters. 

The members of my book group were somewhat divided about their reaction to the book and although we had a decent discussion, there were a few who didn't chime in and I wonder if they even read the book. One member said she read one side of the family's story first, then went back and read the other side's story. She said it was less confusing that way.

Homegoing was less than satisfying, but I am in the minority as it has received numerous awards and was a favorite with a lot of my blogging friends.

American Book Award (2017), PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2017), Audie Award for Literary Fiction & Classics (2017), Dylan Thomas Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017), National Book Critics Circle Award for John Leonard Prize (2016), The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2016), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2017), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Historical Fiction (2016), Alabama Author Award - Fiction (2017).