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A review by margaret45678
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
4.5
On a macro level, the construction of the overall story is amazing. The form is perfectly suited to the content. It's like a mosaic where each chapter is a small piece of the larger picture. Last year I read Karen Tei Tamashita's Brazil-Maru, another multigenerational family story with a similar structure and themes, but which took so much longer to tell a much shorter story that it ended up really dragging. I see that some other reviewers were annoyed by the length of the chapters/individual stories in Homegoing, but I think they are pretty much perfect. Gyasi is really subtle, showing you just enough of each character's life, incorporating some recurring motifs and supernatural dream/vision elements which made the story feel cohesive, but not beating you over the head with anything.
On a micro level, the prose style of this book didn't really blow me away. There were a few instances where the narration used words and phrases that were distractingly anachronistic for the time period of that particular chapter, which was a bit disappointing considering the amount of research that obviously went into the book. However, I can see that it must have been difficult to create a narrative voice that would feel consistent across so many different times and places, and I think for the most part Gyasi was successful. The voices of the characters certainly felt natural and unforced to me, which is very impressive considering how many and varied they are.
On a micro level, the prose style of this book didn't really blow me away. There were a few instances where the narration used words and phrases that were distractingly anachronistic for the time period of that particular chapter, which was a bit disappointing considering the amount of research that obviously went into the book. However, I can see that it must have been difficult to create a narrative voice that would feel consistent across so many different times and places, and I think for the most part Gyasi was successful. The voices of the characters certainly felt natural and unforced to me, which is very impressive considering how many and varied they are.