![]() ![]() The book’s later chapters are reminiscent of the work of Helen Oyeyemi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These chapters, set in Ghana, resonate with the orality of spoken history and myth that has elicited comparisons of Gyasi to Zora Neale Hurston. Some of the best storytelling occurs at the start of the novel. ![]() Each chapter is from the point of view of one character, and as the chapters move chronologically and without skipping generations, each protagonist is the child of one we’ve formerly met. The story ends with the reunification of the two family lines: Marcus, raised in New York, courts the bookish Marjorie, who, in an echo of Gyasi’s own life, moved from Ghana to America in her infancy. ![]() Effia’s Ghanaian descendants weather wars and colonialism Esi’s are sold into slavery in America, and witness the passing of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the Harlem Renaissance, and the heroin epidemic. The book subsequently moves over a period of three hundred years, with each chapter swapping between the two family branches. ![]() While Effia lives in luxury in the Cape Coast Castle, unbeknownst to her, her half-sister Esi is captured in warfare, and then raped and beaten in the ordure-filled dungeon below. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing opens in the eighteenth century in what is modern-day Ghana, where a character named Effia is sold by her parents to an English governor. ![]()
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