Reviews with content warning for Blood - Homegoing

Wow, this book. It’s so ambitious, and I don’t think I really knew what I was getting into, but it pulls it off SO well. There are fourteen main characters—seven generations—and we really only spend a snapshot of their lives with them, but man, Yaa Gyasi is a masterful writer and she makes you care about each and every one of them.

This is almost like a collection of short stories, with the thread of a family line connecting them to each other. And I loved following that line, seeing how what happened to their ancestors affected the new characters, and how so much of our lives are decided just by virtue of what family we’re born into.

It was an excellent book to listen to—though I am forever grateful for the PDF of the family tree that is included because I was referring to it constantly!

I loved Transcendent Kingdom by this author, but I think I loved this one even more, just because I’ve never read anything like this book. I’m excited for whatever Yaa Gyasi writes next!

Read if you like: character-driven stories, generational sagas, family trees, missed connections.

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quirpele's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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achingallover's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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paigieodo's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective tense slow-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Never will you read a fictional novel that feels so honest as Homegoing. Never will you read a book so saturated and vibrant, even as it lays out bleak, grey histories. These stories, these family lines—they're made up. But they're real. Yaa Gyasi does not need to dramatize or embellish history to drive home a point about ancestral trauma or about systemic racism; The history tells the story, Gyasi simply uses her beautiful words as a vehicle. Her characters, all of whom are stunningly rich and full, almost feel tangible in the real world. They endure the mundane much more often than the extraordinary. Gyasi wants us to understand that suffering lies in the average and the simple as well as the audacious and the repugnant. Her characters feel real to me. I feel like I know them, and like I will always remember them. This is both because Gyasi is fantastic at writing characters, and because the history she pulls them from is so rooted in truth. They feel real because they could be, and in many ways, are.

We all carry our families—the ones we know and the ones we don't—in ourselves. We are all traumatized by their traumas, imbued with their loves and their fears, holding all of their good and their bad as well as the good and the bad that was done to them. Yaa Gyasi understands this better than any other author I've encountered. Nothing speaks more to this than these words from the closing chapter:

"How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it—not apart from it, but inside of it."

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deepfriedaries's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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thevietvegan's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This book is about generational trauma and weaves Black history into its narrative so much that you feel like it's a true story. The people feel real, the family feels real, and the pain feels unbearably real. I couldn't put it down, even though it is a very sad book. Each chapter is about the bloodlines from one woman in Ghana, and each generation that came from her, and it's kind of incredible how quickly you fall in love with each generation and want to root for them throughout all the mistakes they make. 5/5, highly recommend. It puts in perspective so much of the Black history and anti-racism works I've been consuming all year.

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