Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
“White men get a choice. They get to choose they job, choose they house. They get to make black babies, then disappear into thin air like wasn’t never there to begin with, like these black women they slept with or raped done laid on top of themselves and got pregnant. White men get to choose for black men too. Used to sell ’em; now they just send ’em to prison like they did my daddy, so that they can’t be with they kids.” Homegoing by […]
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
CBR 15 Bingo: Africa – The book begins, ends, and half of it takes place in Africa. Yaa Gyasi begins Homegoing with a pair of sisters (Effia Otcher and Esi Asare) separated at birth at the height of the African slave trade. One sister, Effia, is raised and married off to a white Englishman on the Gold Coast. The other sister, Esi, stays in a tribal African village. The story covers seven generations. Each chapter is a new person advancing down the timeline and alternates between […]
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
I am an outlier on this work. Yaa Gyasi writes like a motherfucker and I will continue to seek out her work, but this book just wasn’t for me. Transcendent Kingdom aims for big, heavy topics but its treatment of them never feels more than surface level. This work stands in stark contrast to Homegoing, and while I can see the impulse to go for a different tack there’s such a bare bones approach to the very heavy topics that Transcendent Kingdom attempts to wrangle […]
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
CW: there are a lot here, it is a book about both the Black experience in the US from the days of human slavery to modern times and colonial Ghana so like, you may fill in the blanks I really don’t know why this book took me so long to pick up! (This is a sentiment that will be repeated a few times in the next few reviews, be prepared) There was a time (perhaps it is still ongoing) where the Hot Genre was inter […]
Thanks Ashlie/Ardaigle! These arrived on my birthday and totally made my day. 🙂
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
In one word: Grieving Cannonball Read Bingo: Uncannon I picked this for uncannon because Gyasi is giving new life to a story that we’ve seen many times over from the Eurocentric white perspective. There have been plenty of books about drug addiction (even specifically about Oxycontin and the havoc it is wreaking in America), mental illness, the crossroads of science and religion in academia, and an overachieving character trying to fix her heart by using her head. She is taking very familiar tropes and given […]
