#131 Homegoing

 Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 

This is yet another example of one of those books i wish id read so much sooner. Homegoing is an incredibly hyped book across all of the bookish platforms and id honestly never heard a bad review of it or anyone disliking it. The book is set in the 1700's in Ghana we follow a woman who has 2 daughters from different men, 1 daughter is married to a white slave trader and the other daughter is sold into the slave trade and is sent to the America. In this book we get alternating chapers that follow the generatiosn of both of these women. The start of the book has a family tree type diagram so although it is a tiny bit confusing, you can refer back to see who is who and they do interconnect. We follow roughly 10 generations and as i previously mentioned it starts in the 1700's and we are brought right up to near present day. The chapters are fairly short with the reader getting about 40-50 pages on each character. At the very beginning of the book we get longer chapters and longer with each character and i found it got shorter and shorter towards the end of the book. 

The main theme of this book is obviously the slave trade. I found myself being greatly affected by this story when you sit and reflect that this actually happened and it was so despicible and horrendously traumatising. It was written so beautifully written and so raw, i never once doubted the validity of it and found it hard to believe that it was a work of fiction which really attests to the authors skill and story telling abilities. Writing about the slave trade as a topic is so difficult but i think the author did such a good job of showing the sheer contrast of both generations due to circumstance even though they were apart of the same family. 

I did have a few issues with the book, i thought it was overly rushed in parts and we simply didnt get enough time with each character. When i started the book i didnt actually realise how many characters we would be following so it was a bit of a shock when the author tried to fit so much content into 315 pages. I would have preferred a bit more time to get more invested in each character and their individual story. 14-16 characters with each character covering around 50 years of the story and some chapters were as short as 20 pages. That was probably my only big complaint with this book and the main reason why i gave this book 4 stars instead of 5. To write about such a vast history in such a compact way was in my opinion a tad insensitive but thats just my opinion. I still feel that overall this was an excellent novel and it does deserve the hype. I have recently purchased Yaa Gyasi's newest novel on kindle which im excited to get to!