HOMEGOING

by Yaa Gyasi

Reading a story this brilliant and beautiful is so rare that I want to start my review by saying I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone and everyone looking for an amazing summer book. Not only is the story complex and epic, but Gyasi creates characters with whom the reader feels intimately connected.

Homegoing begins in Ghana over 300 years ago as the slave trade is just beginning its devastation. In the first two chapters we meet Effia and Esi, half-sisters unknown to each other. Effia, the beauty of her village, marries the white man in charge of the British Castle nearby and lives there with their son and the other Ghanain women who have married British men. Esi is captured, chained and marched for days from her village to the dungeon of the same castle where she is later put on a ship bound for America.

From there, each chapter moves onto the next generation, alternating between the descendants of Effia and Esi. Effia’s family members mostly stay in Ghana and go through great turmoil. They try to extricate themselves from the conflict the slave trade created not only between the locals and the British, but among the different peoples living there who began to turn on each other. Eventually her line becomes part of the fight for Ghana’s freedom from colonialism, but is also visited by tragedies that almost stop the family line over and over again. Esi’s family lives a story much more familiar to me. They work on multiple plantations, try to escape, and later, after emancipation, find themselves part of the convict-leasing system, that in many ways was harsher and more deadly than slavery itself.

Homegoing consistently astounded me with the breadth and scope of its story and the gorgeous intimacy of the prose. I sincerely can’t wait to read all of Gyasi’s other books. (Lily)