Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears.”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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We all lost our collective minds over Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel, Homegoing, which was a century-spanning epic about race and family, so the pressure was on for her sophomore effort. I think she’s made the smart choice to try for something completely different. Where Homegoing had buckets of characters, narrated in the third person, and a new setting and time period every fifty or so pages, Transcendent Kingdom is a smaller, more intimate portrait of one woman thinking about her life, and thinking about her […]

“I’m a gallery of broken hearts”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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  Yaa Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, was a sprawling family saga about a family whose point of origin was Ghana. Though the family in Transcendent Kingdom also hails from there, this book is nothing like its predecessor. Rather than than span though generations, this book’s main focus is on one person as she deals with the pain and loss her family deals with after coming to America in search of a better life. Gifty is a neuroscience candidate at Stanford studying reward seeking behavior in […]

This is Why We Read

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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This is an astounding book. Profound. Heartbreakingly beautiful. Gyasi employs a narrative structure I haven’t seen before, and it is just one of a million choices she makes that is exactly right. The entire book is exactly right. Each plot point, each character, each word. Each chapter is its own stunning creation, and they all fit together with precision and symmetry into an intricate and complex quilt worthy of being hung on the wall and admired or wrapped around your shoulders and treasured. Why does […]

Home is something carried with us, in our blood, for better or worse

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

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“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home. I’m sorry you have suffered. I’m sorry for the way your suffering casts a shadow over your life, over the woman you have yet to marry, the children you have yet to have.” I have friends who talk about memory like it is a living thing, ancestors like they have never died, […]

A Powerful Story of Family

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Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read “Homegoing” as part of my library’s book club. I didn’t finish it in time for the book club meeting, but I had heard good things about it so I wanted to make sure I fit this into my reading schedule. I ended up reading it on a road trip, which helped me enjoy this book more than if I read this in bits and pieces. “Homegoing” is the story of two half-sisters, neither […]

Amazing, absolutely breath taking. One of My Top 5 Reads This Year.

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Bingo Square Round 2: Underrepresented I expected that this novel would be good given faintingviolet’s review, but it completely surpassed those expectations.  I was completely blown away by this novel, and how elegantly Gyasi plotted this family epic, showing how the slave trade shaped two different countries. I have read books and novels that addressed the experiences of men and women stolen from their homes who survived the Middle Passage and were forced into the United States slavery system. I’ve read about sharecropping, prison labor, the […]



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