Homegoing

14 of us met in our local pub’s heated cabin to discuss this. A summary of comments from the group :-
Well crafted, wonderful read. Knew it would come full circle but was in no way trite. I believed in it all the way through. Historically I learnt a lot and it inspired me to find out more. Left me wanting more and will certainly read her next book Transcendent Kingdom

Didn't like it. Liked the historical elements and the context but didn't feel it was well written apart from the latter half of the book where the characters met their epiphanies and the writing was more lyrical.

Dates as well as names and a family tree would have been really helpful to put it in context.

Episodic so couldn't really get lost in it. Never really felt I had a chance to get to know the characters fully as it moved on to next episode and generation. Historically interesting but lacked continuity. Disjointed.

Enjoyed it after struggling a bit with the start

Loved it. Some stories though seemed to send abruptly.

Had read it before so re-read it . Compelling stories but felt needed more about the characters.

Loved it. Couldn't put it down. Would read another of her books.

Felt the young writer tried to pack perhaps too much in to one book. Complex plotting. Fascinating history of mining, racism, denial of history, segregation, mixed race relationships, riots, Almost a tick box exercise - slavery, Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow laws . Some of the stories stood out more and I enjoyed more than others. Recurring motifs of fire, water and the black stones. Echoes of Adichie's Americanah - cultural differences between Black Africans v Black Americans

9 of us had read this book total score of 73 so - average score of 8.

Firstly I have to say that this book was out of most of the book club members comfort zone and wasn't something we would have thought to pick up. But that's the point of book club, it makes you read things you might not have thought were your reading taste, but then you realise it's a reading road you might like to travel down.

We had a very small group at the Zoom meeting this month buy luckily lots of members emailed me their thoughts and feelings, along with the reviews on here from other members.

This book is obviously about slavery and how black people have been treated in their own country and American in particular. This was something that a lot of us had no idea about, but it's an area we now feel we need to educate ourselves more about. Reading about this history in a fiction book is a good way to start to open up to learning more about what has gone on in the world that we're simply not taught about in school.

We were all horrified by what we read in the chapters in this book, but there was also a good amount of hope in some of the stories. We were all shocked at the way one set of humans can so dehumanise another set just for the colour of their skin. How they felt it was ok to take away their lives, liberty, and family and put them into conditions it's hard to think about. This was a very emotional and intense book filled with things that we could hardly believe we were reading, but that had happened to real people in our history.

One of the main elements we discussed was the use of the word homegoing for the title of the book. We looked at the different ways home appeared in the different chapters. For some people home was where they are now, for others they felt that home was where they had come from. Everyone seemed to be searching for some feeling of being at home in each of the chapters. The of course there is the tidiness of the last chapter with regards a feeling of home. We had a chat about what home means to us and where we all originate from. This led on to our feeling of a shared history that the characters all had. They passed on their language and beliefs as much as possible given their circumstances, which gave them a feeling of home wherever they were.

We all found that it was tricky keeping each person in our memories as we were introduced to so many different people plus the people around them. Each chapter could really have been an entire book with the amount of characters we met. We found that just as were beginning to bond with a character they were snatched from us, sometimes to have a bit part in a later chapter. We did find that having the family tree helped us to track the various family members down through the generations.

Overall we gave this book 7 out of 10.

St Just Thursday Evening Reading Group 1st October 2020.

Homegoing. Yaa Gyasi.

Two strands of criticism emerged from the comments made about this book: firstly that it was a very powerful book, an account of slavery and its repercussions that made for very uncomfortable reading; and secondly that it was too disjointed in its narrative, with possibly too many characters for the reader to identify with.

Those who finished the book said they thought it 'a stark portrayal of the inhumanity that is part of all our heritage'; 'compelling but a difficult read'; and 'particularly relevant to be reading this against the backdrop of recent events' (Black Lives Matter protests and the situation in America). Comparisons were made with Alex Haley's book Roots, and several readers looked up the history of some of the places and events in the book, particularly the Pratt coalmines in Birmingham, Alabama, and the leasing of convict labour; and the Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, from where the slaves were transported across the Atlantic. The researchers found that the events depicted in the book are based on authenticated historical facts.

The book's structure put several readers off reading or finishing it. Despite the family tree at the beginning, it was hard to keep track of all the characters, especially since they had unfamiliar names, and the book in some ways seemed more like a series of short stories than a continuous narrative.

Other comments were about the inter-tribal slave trade on the Gold Coast, which would have made a whole discussion on its own; the fire/water symbolism, which was not entirely clear but might be that fire is a theme of horror in the book, with water maybe indicating the Middle Passage and watery graves; and that in the end, the two halves of the long-separated family coming back together in Ghana was very touching.

Obviously this was a book which struck people in different ways. A difficult book to read, in a number of different ways – also a haunting story, well told, fascinating and emotionally involving and about something which needed to be said.

This book was read during September 2020 and the continuing restrictions due to the Covid-19 virus, and so the discussion was not 'live' as usual, but took place via a Facebook group, email and telephone conversations.

What a great book. It's about the slave trade, starting in Africa in the 1700's and finishing in America today. It never flinches as the horrors and complicity of all concerned are revealed and examined and the repercussions make themselves felt right down the generations. The writing is brilliant. It's a complicated intergenerational story dealing with huge subjects but Gyasi makes it a manageable (with the help of the family tree at the beginning), gripping, terrible, hopeful, human, story. A book everyone should read.