435 pages
English language
Published Aug. 8, 2017 by Charnwood.
In eighteenth-century Ghana, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages. Effia is eventually married to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to her, ESi is imprisoned beneath in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and then shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. The consequences of the sisters' fates reverberate through the generations that follow, From the Gold Coast to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, this is the story of how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation. --back cover
I think this is the best book I've read all year. Makes me wish I still had a book club. There's so much packed into this book. Much to think about.
I honestly didn't know what I was grabbing when I snagged this from the shelf at the library. It's not exactly a novel, and not exactly a short story collection, but vignettes, small slices of life from a single family over hundreds of years. Either way, it was well written, and I would have enjoyed even deeper looks into their lives.
This is less a novel and more a collection of connected short stories. I recently read "Barkskins" by Annie Proulx, which is very similar insofar as it follows multiple characters down through generations, and I have many of the same criticisms. Being introduced to so many characters, many who we follow for fewer than 30 pages, makes it tough to care about any of them as individuals. Both books detail the way that injustice is carried down through generations. But "Homegoing" provides an interesting contextualization of a history that I've only read about in a dry, non-fictional context, and the book helps to make it feel much more real and immediate.
