Once in a while a novel such as Homecoming by Yaa Gyasi makes its way on to your reading list. It is beautiful, evocative and descriptive. Following two half sisters and their family members through generations, this a picture of a changing world, families and fortunes.

Highly recommended.

I originally tried to read Homegoing when I was first sent a copy of the book but I really struggled with the tough subject matter. I finally felt ready to pick this back up again and I'm so glad I did. The writing was beautiful and the story was incredibly moving and absorbing. It was incredible to think of the different paths life can take and the unknown impact of your ancestors. My only issue with the book, and the reason for the rating, is that I struggled to keep track of the characters and therefore who was the ancestor of who. I would have loved a family tree at the back of the book to help with this.

This book was so emotionally resonant and vivid. I learned more about the shocking and shameful history of slavery, and at times the humanity of the characters presented here made those experiences even more painful to read. It was romantic also, and the threads of connection throughout were tantalising and felt genuine. I have already bought the book for my shelf, and to lend to friends.

I wrote this review after receiving a complimentary copy for perusal from Netgalley, in exchange for an unbiased and honest review.

Beginning in 18th-century Ghana, we follow the lives of half sisters Effia and Esi. One marries a slave trader, while the other is sold into slavery. With each chapter we learn what happens to future generations of their families. We see that no-one is untouched by slavery and the repercussions that are felt to this day .

The jumps in time took some getting used to, but that aside Homegoing* is an unputdownable and necessary read.

By far one of the best books I've read this year, Homegoing's wide praise is definitely well deserved. This book follows the story of two half sisters, Effia and Esi, who will never meet and will live lives at their opposites: Esi becomes a spoil of war during long-standing tribal disputes and is eventually sold into slavery; while Effia marries a British governor and slaver and lives her whole life in Ghana. From this starting point, we are slowly drawn into an incredibly well-constructed story, following the descendants of both sisters as the family's history unfolds before our eyes.

I tend to enjoy reading family sagas, mainly due to my love of characters and the fact that we usually get to delve deep into internal dynamics, examine relationships and discover hidden secrets. Lots of drama in families. But this book takes it a step further: we follow these families for the beauty of six descendants each, spanning centuries. That's an incredibly ambitious project, and one that fully hits its target.

I'll admit, I was a bit sceptical at first when I noticed the narrative style: each chapter is narrated by a different descendant, alternating between Effia's and Esi's, and jumping (sometimes substantially) forward in the timeline. I was afraid this would quickly become confusing or leave too many plot holes. I was happily contradicted. Notwithstanding the terrible formatting of my review copy (the beginning and ending of each chapter were never indicated, so I actually had to guess who the next narrator was, and indeed that the previous chapter had ended, from the change in register... oh well, it was an arc after all!), I was never confused and all my doubts and questions were somehow always answered! Even though they had a very limited time at their disposal, characters are all extremely well-rounded and I easily grew attached to them. They are often faced with incredibly difficult situations and live in periods of great social and political turmoil, which of course influences their decisions and their fate.

Speaking of which, I also really enjoyed the historical aspect of the book. Slavery and colonialism are incredibly dark pages of human history, which far too often we prefer to ignore, as if we could forget they ever happened at all. Luckily, writers like Yaa Gyasi are there to remind us that, right up to modern times, we are living with the consequences of the choices that were made so many years ago. I particularly appreciated being able to read about the situation both in the USA and in Ghana: it is rare to read a book that isn't focused solely on a Western perspective of history, and for this Homegoing is even more precious. It seems as if the author took the advice of her own characters:

"We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture."

Overall, Homegoing is an extremely powerful and gripping novel, masterfully combining family, history and social issues tied together by an excellent writing style, leaving you with a book that is over way too quickly, but will likely stay with you for a very long time.

After spending a good 20 days on it , I am finally done with this beauty ! It is a very well written, multilayered book that is sure to keep a reader engaged. When I read the summary I wondered how the writer would take us through 300 hundred years which would invariably contain a lot of characters. It takes one through the parallel lives of Effie the beauty - who is married to an English man , and her half sister Esi, who is held captive by the same colony of English men. It traces the lives of the descendants of both sisters, spanning many decades , countries and touching upon many lives.
The book takes one through the rich African culture , slavery, the agonising lives of slaves , the abolition of slavery and treatment of black people after that.
It isn't the kind of book one can or should read fast , as it is full of heartwrenching moments that need to be savored just as the Author aims them to be.
Though there are many characters , it is worthy of praise as to how the Author has managed to keep the plot free of confusion. It's like the lineage is subtly yet strongly built in your mind...
To me , each generation was like a short story , and Yaw's is my favourite among them all. The book has elements of magic , and the strong belief in the supernatural prevails throughout.
I've never had the opportunity to encounter a person of African descent personally but this book surely throws light on how it all began , and the rich history they come with. My respect has surely heightened for these people who have had so much suffering in their lives and continue to bear the brunt for it.
The book is almost like an ode by the writer to her roots and her ancestors. It is a very intimate and touching account of the suffering that a lot of people have gone through. It feels like the country was inflicted with so many scars that they run keep in the people and even today there is a faint trace of it, resulting in a deep connect with their ancestors & family even now. I have a new perspective towards this culture and there is so much that's left unexplored and underappreciated about them.

Though we were only with these characters for a single anecdote of their lives, they felt well developed. Epic in scope, this covered a lot of ground with a lot of tough issues being raised. While I did occasionally struggle to identify which characters were the links to previous stories, I nevertheless deeply respect Gyasi for not giving into an easy "intertwining" or ":meeting" of the two threads of narrative she was tracing.

This novel manages to cover 250 years of slavery and colonialism in just over 300 pages. This begins by following the dual narratives of two different families in two different tribes - Fante and Asante. This initially focuses on two sisters, Effia and Esi, who were dealt two very different fates.

One sister continues to live in their home country of Ghana and marries a British soldier working in the slave trade, while the other sister is sold into slavery and is shipped to America against her will. The disparate paths the two sister's life were taken on sent reverberations down their entire family lines, and impacted each and every generation.

This is an incredibly moving multi-generational saga. Each generation had to deal with their own version of the racism encountered by their ancestors. To see how little humanity had evolved, in this respect, was deeply saddening.

The multitude of characters felt initially a little daunting and I wanted each character more time to tell their respective stories. I honestly could have read 1,000 more pages if it meant I got to further explore each character and each time period, and to give the closure I craved for to each of their stories.

This is such a powerful story that felt almost overwhelming in the sorrow it imparted to the reader. I often felt sickened by what humans have inflicted on their own race, purely because of their skin colour. Despite every ounce of sadness this drained from me, I would read it all over again for the power and the importance of this book. And I think it is only right to complete this review with a quote from the book, that sums up exactly why:

"We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So, when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice would come forth?"

This book had me hooked from the beginning until the end. It's an amazingly detailed book in a lot of ways, from the descriptions of Africa and areas of Alabama to what all the characters go through over time. I found myself feeling for the characters and was riveted by every word. The subject matter is though-provoking and very very sensitively written about, but not so much that it takes away from the story. This book is a real gem! The plot has so many twists and turns that there's never a dull moment and the pacing was excellent. I would definitely read it again and recommend it to anyone who likes people overcoming obstacles in life, history and a read that will make an impact. Thanks so much to the author and publisher for the opportunity to review the book in exchange for an honest review. A brilliantly written debut novel! It is so vividly written I felt like I was in the places in the novel and surrounded by the characters.

Really amazing - loved the story spanning the generations, the characters really resonated of their times

5★
Hard to believe this powerful, heart-rending family saga is the author’s first novel. Sadly, it’s more history than fiction. Gyasi uses distinctive voices for the characters in seven generations of Big Man Cobbe Otcher’s descendants from Ghana in the 1700s to today in both Ghana and the US.

PART ONE

Like other men then, Cobbe had several wives and countless children. Effia’s mother died in a fire, so her father’s first wife grudgingly raised her but insisted she was bad luck. Rather than let Effia marry her intended village match, her step-mother convinced Cobbe that his daughter was cursed, so they allowed a smitten young white soldier to take her with him.

British soldiers and traders often took a “wench” and had second families. James shows his teen wife her fancy new rooms in the Castle (the infamous Cape Coast Castle – easily found on Wikipedia).

While on a tour of the upper area, “. . . she felt a breeze hit her feet from small holes in the ground.

‘What’s below?’ she asked James, and the mangled Fante word [her language] that came back to her was ‘cargo’.

Then carried up with the breeze, came a faint crying sound. So faint, Effia thought she was imagining it until she lowered herself down, rested her ear against the grate.

‘James, are there people down there?’ she asked.”

Effia doesn’t know, but in the dungeon below is her 15-year-old half-sister, Esi, stolen and sold by a rival village. African villages have been kidnapping each other as human ‘cargo’ to trade with the British.

Effia’s and Esi’s family lines are tracked alongside each other in alternating chapters. You really do need a family tree to help keep track. I wish the one in the front had some dates to help me compare what was happening in Africa and America with what was happening in Australia and other parts of the world. I’ve added one at the bottom of my Goodreads review, since my Kindle version didn’t have one.

Esi’s is next.

“Esi grew up in bliss. The villagers called her ripe mango because she was just on the right side of spoiled, still sweet. There was nothing her parents would refuse her.”

Now, she’s been captured and packed into the Cape Coast Castle dungeon.

“Sometimes there were so many bodies stacked into the women’s dungeon that they all had to lie, stomach down, so that women could be stacked on top of them.

. . .

Before the Castle, she was the daughter of Big Man and his third wife, Maame. Now she was dust. Before the Castle she was the prettiest girl in the village. Now she was thin air.”

Gyasi has a way of describing things that can bring a smile at the oddest times.

“The rainy season was coming and soon the air would start to thicken, and the people of the Gold Coast would have to relearn how to move in a climate that was always hot and wet, as though it intended to cook its inhabitants for dinner.”

Effia’s family remains in Africa, but Esi is shipped as a slave to an American cotton plantation, and her descendants suffer cruelly as Lincoln’s nation struggles to come to terms with emancipation after the American Civil War.

PART TWO
Fifteen years after the war ended, blacks were still 'arrested' and 'fined'. H is Esi’s great-grandson, in a holding cell, talking to a fellow prisoner.

“It took three policemen to knock H down, four to put him in chains.

‘I ain’t done nothing.!’ he shouted once they got him to the jail cell, but he was speaking only to the air they had left behind. He’d never seen people walk away so quickly, and he knew he had scared them. . .

‘Say you was studyin’ a white woman.’

‘Who say?’

‘The police. Heard ‘em talkin’ ‘bout what to say ‘fore they went out to get you . . .

Don’t matter if you was or wasn’t. All they gotta do is say you was . . . dem white folks can’t stand the sight of you. Walkin’ round as free as can be.'”

He can pay a $10 fine (he has $5, but it’s taken 10 years of sharecropping to save that), so “on a sweltering July day in 1880, H was chained to ten other men and sold by the state of Alabama to work the coal mines just outside of Birmingham.”

One of my grandfathers was born in 1881, so this is hardly ancient history to me. It’s appalling no matter when it was, but I think we are inclined to make excuses for the distant past, liking to think we’re better than that now.

Sex slaves and children working in third world countries certainly don’t think so. https://labs.theguardian.com/unicef-child-labour/

As for history, there’s a nice scene where Effia’s great-great-great grandson, Yaw Agyekum, is teaching a class of 14 to 15-year-old boys, bright, wealthy or both. On the first day of term, he writes “History is storytelling” on the board. He has a badly scarred face about which students have gossiped for years.

“Who would like to tell the story of how I got my scar?”

Finally, one by one, some boys tell different stories, ranging from he was born by fire (why he’s so smart), his mother was fighting evil spirits, his father had cursed the gods, and best of all “I heard you did it to yourself, so that you would have something to talk about on the first day of class,” which understandably cracks up the class.

When he asks whose story is correct, they are dumbfounded.

“Peter raised his hand. ‘Mr Agyekum, we cannot know which story is correct.’ He looked at the rest of the class, slowly understanding. ‘We cannot know which story is correct because we were not there.’”

Yaw explains that history is full of conflicting stories, so whose do we believe?

“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So, when you study history, you must always ask yourself, whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”

And THAT, my fellow readers sums up why more people should read more!

Gyasi has given voices to as many people as she can, representing everyone from African tribal leaders to slaves to Harlem drug addicts. And she’s done it wonderfully.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin UK for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted. This is already receiving nominations and awards, which is no surprise

An eye opening, shocking, heartfelt and unique novel, about a period of history that is responsible for an ongoing and entrenched culture of racism and discriminatoin today. Never laying blame on one group, exposing the many who enabled slavery and profited from it.. By featuring generations of characters Gyasi is able to portray the scale of people effected and structures created. An incredible historical novel.

Why bother with writing this review when my feelings can be summed up in: READ IT.

Thank you to netgalley and Viking for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I'm a white woman so whilst I endeavour to explain things as best as I can let me know if I've said something offensive and I'll correct it ASAP.

Homegoing follows the generations of 2 sisters (who didn't know each other existed), Effia who is sold into slavery and Esi who is a slave trader's wife. It alternates POVs from each side of the family though each generation until the modern day.

This book just really affected me. I just sat for like half an hour afterwards just not sure what to do with myself. I still just sit and think about it and I read it in December. It goes through every kind of racial inequality and experience that you can imagine from people who are descended from African slaves. Of course, it's not every experience but it just felt like it. We go through riding the boat to America, to taking part in the slave trade just to live, to being persecuted for your father taking part in the slave trade, to growing up on cotton farms, to living free but not really free at all, to mine working, to the 1960s race riots, and so on and so forth. I really loved that there wasn't just being put down for your race but also there was sexuality discussions in tense times for being gay.

I could not believe that this was a debut, the writing was so incredible. I could really feel everything and imagine all the settings described. I was so close to tears for a lot of it because the writing was so on point. I will definitely be reading anything Yaa Gyasi releases next.

If I have one complaint it was the PO switching, when I started the book I found it a bit disjointed because I wasn't used to it. However after a few of these changes I got used to it and it began to feel a lot more natural. Gyasi was really good at introducing you to the next character, whether it be when they're a baby or really getting to know them, you at least have a vague idea of who you're going to hear from next.

I honestly don't think I can do this book justice so please promise me you'll read it. It's one of those moments in life where I just felt changed as a person simply for reading it.

(4.5 stars) The more hype a book has received, the more likely I am to be especially critical towards it. Are you the same? So to start with I felt rather uncharitable towards this one, saying to myself, “oh, but this is just like Beloved, or The Invention of Wings, or Ruby.” But generation by generation and story by story, Gyasi won me over. I was impressed by just how many aspects of the African and African-American experience she was able to bring into one book, and how the elements of water, fire and blood keep weaving through the chapters.

Ultimately this felt to me more like a linked short story collection than like a novel – I had a hard time keeping the big picture in mind, and inevitably there were some chapters I responded to more strongly than to others – but nonetheless I think it is full of clear-eyed observations about the ongoing role race plays in American life. I expect that for Gyasi this was a cathartic exercise in tracing her own history (surely she’s Marjorie), but she’s drawn something universal out of that personal material. A fine achievement.

To be published in numerous local and regional magazines in April: Homegoing follows the descendants of two African sisters – one sold into slavery, the other married off to a slave trader. We meet warring tribes in Ghana, brutalised slaves on American plantations, men forced into hard labour once slavery has supposedly been outlawed, drug addicts and numerous other characters. Brilliantly written, vivid and, at times, harrowing, this is one of those books you’ll find yourself recommending to anyone who’ll listen.

Homegoing

An amazing debut novel, Homegoing documents the American slave trade. The story of two half sisters, separated when one of sold into slavery and the other is married off to a British slaver.

Homegoing is an exceptionally stunning and incredible read. Gyasi has covered so much in just 300 pages that your head will be swimming with so many subjects and injustices.

A spellbinding read that will stay with me a long time.

I voluntarily reviewed an ARC of this book, with thanks to Netgalley and the publisher. 5 huge stars

A beautifully written book. An amazing tale through the decades of these two sisters and their descendants as their lives take such very different paths. At times the story can be brutal, but it illustrates the harsh truths of the time. Thoroughly enjoyable.

I would like to thank Penguin Books (UK) for providing me with an advanced reading copy of this book.

Unpopular opinion time. I've had several friends recommend this book to me saying that it blew them away, but I have to admit I struggled with the format.

Homegoing tells an important story but I wasn't able to completely immerse myself into the story because of the format in which it is told. Each chapter is in itself a brief short story, a small snapshot from each generation, but it was too disjointed for me as a whole.

I got a rather lost and frustrated. I had a problem keeping track of the characters and I had to keep referring to my notes. Each chapter is devoted to one character per generation, following two generations. The chapters are only around twenty'ish pages long so I didn't get to spend much time with the characters and as a result, I didn't get to know them in the way I would have liked to, or needed to. There wasn't time to get to know them on an emotional level or to be able to fully relate to their struggles and experiences. The story was in a constant state of change. This started to really annoy me, I was forever having to remind myself which family line I was on and which generation of that family line the character descended from. I found myself consistently being pulled out of the story with every new chapter.

I'm a character reader, I need to connect and feel for the characters and in this instance, because of the format, they weren't detailed or in depth enough for me to be able to do that.

Wow! An amazingly stunning debut , to pull of a narrative written over generations in different voices would be a tall order and for a new novelist - an amazing achievement. There have been many stories written about slavery over the past few years but none have had the power of story telling as yaa gysai. To tell how the story begins : two sisters who never meet and a story that progresses into each of their ancestory line up to modern day. To say any more would be a huge spoiler, so buy it , read it & buy it for everyone you know !

I am so very sorry but I just could not resonate with this book at all and failed to finish it. The book jumps from character to character and I just couldn't keep up with who was who or what was going on. This was not helped by the lack of chapters etc. in the ARC. This said, I do believe that I'm in the minority here and wish the author the best of luck with this book.