Review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Challenges: 

Diversity Bingo 2017: Displaced Main Character

Everyone has raved about this book since it came out and once again I am disappointed. The premise was interesting but it just didn’t work for me. 

We follow two half-sisters, however they don’t know they are sisters and they never actually meet in the story. Each chapter tells the story of one of their descendants, so we only get to know each characters for quite a short while in their lives. 

At the beginning of the story set in 18th century Ghana one of the sisters is married to a wealthy Englishman, a commander at the fort, while the other sister is taken and sold as a slave in America. As mentioned we follow their descendants through time and see how life pans out for them right up until present day. 

As for the challenge there were certainly a number of displaced characters. The sister sold as a slave is of course forcibly removed from her homeland, but a number of the other characters are also forced by various circumstances to leave their original home to settle elsewhere. 

As I said I didn’t really like this book. But I think that is just because I never really liked short stories, and that is essentially what this book is; a number of short stories more or less tenuously connected by the blood line of the family. This book is about a lot of things; family, heritage, race, discrimination, history, but I never felt like the subjects were explored deeply enough in the short amount of time we got to spend with each character. 

I gave this book 2,5 stars out of 5.