The main problem with "Homegoing' was it had the misfortune of coming out the same year, as "The Underground Railroad," by Colson Whitehead. That book garnered so much hype, not all of it undeserved, and Whitehead was already a renowned author that this first novel, by Yaa Gyrasi failed to generate the literary heat it should have.
What this first novel accomplishes is amazing. Going back centuries, it starts with two sisters, one who lives in a master's castle, one who is enslaved in the dungeon just below. Neither one know the other is there. In another era, this would have been a mammoth, Michner-esque opus, but the genius of this novelist, is to telescope everything, and move time forward, by centering succeeding chapters on the descendants of the sisters, taking the reader from the Civil War, to the Harlem Renaissance, to the racially charged battleground New York and other urban cities were in the Sixties. Time moves forward with each chapter, so the entire cultural history of this family, representative of a community, is given, in just a succinct three hundred pages.
No extraneous prose, here, darlings! That Zadie Smith could take some lessons from Miss Gyrasi. Strong on both character and narrative drive, "Homegoing" should have received more attention than it did. It wuz robbed.
Like the movie "Moonlight" almost was, girls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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