Análisis de diario de la biblioteca
| Two hundred fifty years ago in what is modern-day Ghana, two half-sisters are each given a special stone by their mother. Effia marries an Englishman and lives in the ignominiously named Castle, the center of the African Gold Coast slavery trade. Esi is temporarily imprisoned in the Castle's hellish dungeon before she is shipped to the other side of the world. Effia's stone passes through her line-including a privileged son, a murdered mother, and a survivor of fire-and travels to the American South two centuries later. Esi's stone remains buried in Africa, much like her desperate soul, as descendants are enslaved first by laws, then by heinous circumstances torturing the African American community, from unjust imprisonment to Jim Crow to drug addiction. Two present-day members of the family will eventually meet in San Francisco and, unaware of their shared past, restore the family's torn fabric. -VERDICT Homegoing's early hype proves well deserved; enhancing Gyasi's magnificent epic, narrator Dominic Hoffman shines across continents, oceans, and generations and makes this a must-have for all collections. ["This is an amazing first novel, remarkable in its epic vision": LJ 6/1/16 starred review of the Knopf hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. |
Análisis semanal de editoriales
| Gyasi's amazing debut offers an unforgettable, page-turning look at the histories of Ghana and America, as the author traces a single bloodline across seven generations, beginning with Ghanaian half-sisters Effia, who is married off to a British colonizer in the 1760s, and Esi, who is captured into the British slave-trading system around the same time. These women never meet, never know of each other's existence, yet in alternating narratives we see their respective families swell through the eyes of slaves, wanderers, union leaders, teachers, heroin addicts, and more-these often feel like linked short stories, with each descendent receiving his or her own chapter. Esi's descendants find themselves on the other side of the Atlantic, toiling on plantations in the American South before escaping to the North for freedom, while Effia's offspring become intertwined in the Gold Coast slave trade, until her grandson breaks away and disappears to live a simple existence with his true love. In both America and Ghana, prosperity rises and falls from parent to child, love comes and goes, and the characters' trust of white men wavers. These story elements purposely echo like ghosts-as history often repeats itself-yet Gyasi writes each narrative with remarkable freshness and subtlety. A marvelous novel. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. |
