yaa gyasi – Pleasant Nights

Title: Transcendent Kingdom

Author: Yaa Gyasi

Genre: Black and African-American Literature

I read Homegoing earlier this year and just loved it. The story was so interesting, and the book was just beautifully written. I was just blown away at how captivating it was. And, although I didn’t love this one as much, it was still just such an excellent book. I had no trouble relating to Gifty and her struggles, even though I haven’t experienced them myself. Such is the talent of Gyasi, that even though I’m white, have parents who are still together, born in America, no family members with substance abuse issues, literally Gifty’s polar opposite, I could still get into her psyche because that’s what talented authors do. They create characters that anyone can inhabit, just for a few days. And Gifty will stick with me.

From Goodreads: Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.

What was most fascinating to me was Gifty’s struggle with her faith. I’m not religious at all and never have been. So seeing Gifty in a tug-of-war with her beliefs was interesting. Her soul is laid bare in this book, and at an early age, she’s forced to grow up. I flew through this book, but not necessarily to see how the plot unfolds, like with most books. But, I just wanted to keep spending time with Gifty and seeing her evolve. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for Gyasi’s next book. Count me as a fan.

Homegoing

Title: Homegoing

Author: Yaa Gyasi

Genre: Black historical fiction

PopSugar Reading Challenge Prompt: book with a family tree

I knew absolutely nothing about this book, other than the rave reviews. And by the time I was finished, I couldn’t believe how Gyasi managed to get me to care about each and every character in just a few pages. What a marvel this book is.

From Goodreads:

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.

You only spend a short amount of time with each character, and although some bleed into their child’s story, some don’t. But the entire focus is on the new character. I was drawn in so quickly to each story, which felt like small snapshots into what life was like in America and in Africa around the same time. Of course, I knew that slavery would be an atrocity that characters in America face, but I really had no idea what life in Africa would be like for these characters. I was just blown away by how captivating each individual story was. The hype over this book is much deserved. I can’t wait to see what Gyasi’s next novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has in store for me.