Reviews with content warning for Slavery - Homegoing

I really liked it!! Pretty dark but sooo interesting. I feel like I learned so much about Ghana and the history of their people and in America too. I really like how the stories intertwined but I do wish we got to see more of their lives then the little snapshots we get especially for the people in the later generations. I thought it was really well written and some of the imagery and feelings evoked were horrific but handled with a lot of care and poetry. Majorie and the Old Woman 😭😭😭✨✨🫶 SAM AND NESS! KOJO AND ANNA 😭 every storyline just had so much heartbreak and pain and suffering and you just feel so much humanity for them. Good book!!

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mdal26's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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agiecummings's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

Wow wow wow. I didn’t fully know what I was getting myself into when I started reading this book, but 3 chapters in I was absolutely hooked. The beautifully crafted storytelling of each of the two halves of a family tree across multiple generations, and ultimately places, was absolutely stunning. I was floored by the intricacies of this story, specifically some of the situations that the characters faced as Black “free” people in America. Often, the US education system brushes things like Jim Crow and its legacy under the rug and this so intricately explored those different circumstances in an honest and heartbreaking way.

Yaa Gyasi is a story teller and a historian wrapped up into one it felt like. I have been on a more complete and compelling history lesson on the realities of being Black and/or African in 300 pages than I have in all my years of schooling. What a gift she has given us with this book.

She says in the book that Marjorie is trying to find books that she “can feel inside” and I felt that way about this book. Every character was so complete and so real: you could feel, smell, see, and hear them as if they were sitting right next to you as you read their story. It was all-encompassing.

And, realistically, I don’t think I’ve heard a more real, honest, and raw description of what it is like to be a Black American today than in the last chapter of this book. Between the pages of 289-290 and 295-296, Yaa heartbreakingly and succinctly spells out exactly what we (white people, of colonizers’ descent) have wrought and the realities of how that affects everyday life of people who are generations removed from slavery itself. I was floored by this book. Absolutely floored.

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artemisg's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Brutally beautiful. How Gyasi managed to make every character and their voice distinct in 20ish pages is a miracle to me. We spend so little time with everyone, but their stories feel told; they feel real and whole. That is an achievement.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others.

This feels like an essential novel. Through reading this, I came to understand things I didn’t necessarily enjoy. In this novel, we follow two different familial lines from Ghana. One ancestral line stems from a women who was married off to an English slave trader, and one from a woman who was captured and traded as a slave. The stories heartbreakingly mirror one another in some ways and are heartwrenchingly different in others.

If we go to the white man for school, we will learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.

So much was stolen from the people in this book, and so much was stolen from enslaved people and indigenous communities in the slave trade. This book examines the prison complex and, segregation and drug abuse. It is also beautifully written, and emotional and important and everything to me.

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noahsingh's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative reflective sad

4.25

Enjoyed a lot of aspects of this book:
- Love a family/generational story.
-Colonial resistance storylines were really interesting.
-Felt like I heard some perspectives I hadn't heard before, and learnt some historical stuff about the exploitation of black people post-slavery I hadn't heard about before.

Ending was a lil disappointing to me tho,

in the sense that I wish Marjorie had been aware of her families past a bit more through Akua and therefore somehow able to recognise Marcus as familiy

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doublel11's review

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challenging dark informative reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Some of this book was hard to read, due to the nature of the content, but I still liked this book. I was worried it would be hard to keep track of who was who over the generations, but it wasn't.

I appreciated the earlier chapters more because I felt like I learned more from that part of the book. It's hard to sum up my thoughts on this one, but it's well written, and overall I would definitely recommend.

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