Brina's Reviews > Homegoing

I give 5 shining stars to Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, the best debut novel I have read this year. In this semi autobiographical tale, Gyasi follows the family histories of two half sisters, Effia the beauty and Esi to reveal how their families end up. Each chapter is a vignette focusing on a family member in subsequent generations, alternating between Effia and Esi's families until we reach present day. Here are their until now largely untold stories.

Effia the beauty had been raised by her step mother Baaba who did not love her as her own. Saved from a fire that plays a prominent role in her family's history for generations to come, Effia becomes the village's beauty long before she reaches marriageable age. Baaba, who always resented Effia's presence, sells her to the British in order to ensure the Asante's place in the slave trade, and Effia marries an English governor rather than a tribal chief. The only memory she takes with her is a black stone polished by fire.

One village over from Effia's, Esi Asare becomes a spoil of a tribal war. In a subsequent war, she is enslaved and taken to the same Cape Coastal Castle where Effia lives as the governor's wife. Before becoming captive, Esi receives a black stone from her mother Maame and finds out that she is not her mother's first born, rather that she had another daughter who she lost in a fire. Through the stone and oral histories, Esi learns that separated sisters are to be forever cursed in their family history. In spite of hearing this tale, Esi is determined to hang onto her stone, even when she is sold into slavery and bound in horrid conditions for America.

Gyasi interconnects the stories of Effia and Esi's descendants by alternating chapters. Each chapter tells the tale of the next member of each sister's family down to present time. Effia's family remains in Ghana whereas Esi's descendants move back and forth between the southern and northern United States. Playing a role in each chapter is the black stone and oral tradition as well as black pride and remembering where one came from through both the good times and the sacrifices made. In addition to the family, we read how their choices reflect the turmoil happening in both Ghana and the United States up through present times, which made the book even more powerful than it would have been if Gyasi only chose to tell a family narrative.

Because Gyasi only uses twenty pages to tell of each generation, the pages are powerful and packed full of detail and flowing language. Thus, each chapter read quickly as I desired to find out how the families ended up. I enjoyed the vignette format as though it were Gyasi telling us in person the African style oral history of where her ancestor Effia started and where she ended up. It would have been interesting to know a few details in the gaps between generations, but Gyasi fills these in easily enough in the next story. An extremely powerful read being billed as this generation's Roots, I immensely enjoyed Homegoing and look forward to Gyasi's future novels.