Homegoing

You may have read Yaa Gyasi’s novel in 2016 when it first came out – it won more awards and was on more notable book lists than I have space to list here. It’s worth picking up again or for the first time. Beginning in the mid-1700s with two half-sisters, the novel traces the sisters and their descendants—as one sister and family remain in Africa, and the other gets sold into slavery and ends up in America. And while I usually despair at novels that show me an extensive family tree before even starting the story, Gyasi does a good job at keeping the families and descendants straight by using the chapters to organize and consistently switching between descendents, and by placing the characters within their historical time frame. The novel is jam-packed (Gyasi goes from the 1750s to the present day in about 300 pages), which moves it along quickly. But, Gyasi also looks straight at slavery, Jim Crow laws, colonization, and police brutality, forcing the reader to slow down and look at those issues throughout history. Pick up this book and immerse yourself.