A review by jesshindes
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I came to Homegoing a bit late, or a bit backwards; I read Yaa Gyasi's second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, in book group last year (great choice, thanks Rosie) and only got around to reading her first this year. That wasn't because of any lack of enthusiasm; I loved Transcendent Kingdom and had heard a lot of great things about this novel. All of them were correct! Homegoing packs several centuries, two continents, and dozens of characters into just over 300 pages and somehow manages to give the reader a meaningful insight into all of them.  The novel begins with two sisters in what is now Ghana - one who marries a white slaver, one of whom is sold into slavery - and continues on through the line of their descendants up until the present day. Each pair of chapters steps forward another generation along its parallel lines: the branch of the family which stays in Africa and those who are taken to the USA. You drop into a moment of each character's life - maybe a few months, a year - and then whoosh, the baby you've seen toddling around in the previous chapter is an adult and you're seeing the world through their eyes. It's such a compelling narrative effect but in the hands of a less skilful writer, it's easy to see how the characters might have felt flat or emblematic; this is the enslaved character working in the cotton fields, this is the character in early 20th-century Harlem who wishes she were a singer, etc. But it doesn't feel like that. They're all beautifully rendered, complex people and - what I really, really liked - they're all reasonably well-informed about the family who preceded them. They're connected to their ancestors. The people who you know up close are remembered by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, part of the story of itself that each branch of the family tells. I loved that. Even under circumstances that would make it very easy to lose touch with the past, these histories are not forgotten but rather become a crucial part of how each character sees him or herself. 

That connection and that memory is I think particularly important in the context of a novel that necessarily deals with a huge amount of brutality and suffering. Obviously the history of the slave trade and its historical ramifications is a horrible, bleak history of colonial violence and Gyasi doesn't shy away from that (nor should she) but she finds a counterbalance in the way that her characters hang onto their humanity - their family, their community - in the face of everything that is done to them. It's an incredibly tricky balancing act to pull off, I think - to depict the pain clearly and honestly without making a book that's so unrelenting it becomes unbearable - which is one of the very many reasons that I cannot BELIEVE this was a debut novel. What a thing to have written.
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