One sister marries an English man who trades slaves, and her son becomes a village chief. The story starts in Ghana and we follow the lives of two half sisters who were born in different villages, thus showing two possible paths that led to African descendants of today. But such wasn’t the case and I was glad that the plot was easy to follow and understand. When I learned of this in reviews I read, I thought it would make for a confusing reading experience. I think it’s the first novel I’ve read in which each chapter focuses on and is told from a different narrator, never returning to the same character perspective again. (Goodreads) My thoughts:Īlthough Homegoing is a novel, I see it more as a short story collection. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed-and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. They are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” “And in my village we have a saying about separated sisters. I think that would be the best way to communicate how the book made me feel. I wish I could just utter a sound, a single cry, that encompasses all I want to convey about how I felt while I read Homegoing.

I want to share them all, but I don’t know how to express them. I’ve procrastinated on writing about it because I felt intimidated by all the emotions I felt and thoughts I thought while reading the novel. Homegoing was the best book I read this year.

Goodreads homegoing