How deep is the connection of family? Of sisters seperated at birth? How deep is love through the worst of life’s trials, terror and torment? In this novel we learn the deep connections through eight generations. Here is my book review Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

West Africa

As the slave trade is gearing up and England has colonized, the native tribes turn against each other. It’s the eighteenth century in Ghana. Two half sisters are born, in different villages. Neither will ever know the other, but their connection is inscribed on their souls. Each always feeling a part of her is missing, despite the extreme different circumstances their lives will take. One will marry a British officer and lead a life of luxury, even though she is a black women, her status will be elevated for a lifetime. She will live out her life in a colonial castle. Her sister, captured and thrown into a holding cell in the same castle, will eventually make the horrific journey to the America’s and become a slave.

Eight Generations

Gyasi will develop the characters in this novel, following the two seperate but parrellel lives of the the descendants of these half sisters…one family in Ghana and not arriving in America until the 1970’s. The other family enduring slavery, civil war, and Harlem in the 1970’s. Gyasi looks deeply in this novel at the longlasting effects on a nation and a family that slavery and racism had…and still has…holding the memory of captivitiy in hearts forever.

****Four stars for Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

Read last week’s Book Review Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See

My current read The Armor of Light by Ken Follett

Thank you for reading my book review Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.

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