It's currently the book on everyone's to-read pile, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016) was only brought to my attention last week but it has already spread like wildfire through the literary world. 
 And how I wish I could say that I liked it. Homegoing begins in Ghana in the late-1700s with Effia and Esi, two half-sisters with very different lives. Essia was sold to the white Englishman James and lives with him in his castle. In the dungeons below, Esi is preparing to be shipped off to America. The novel follows Effia and Esi's descendants through a series of interchanging vignettes up to the present time. My problem with Homegoing lies within these vignettes. Each new vignette presents a new descendent, a new character. I don't know about how you read but for me it takes a couple of pages to get used to a character, to be able to fully connect with them and their story. However, I found that whenever I finally did connect with the new character I was met with a page break and then a new story would begin. 
 For me, the idea of presenting this novel as a collection of character-driven vignettes causes it to become a disjointed mess. Fourteen characters get their own stories in this novel and my edition is 335 pages long. That means that, on average, each character got 23.9 pages to themselves. Gyasi just is not able to create whole, believable characters in 24 pages. I wish she either cut the family tree or made the book longer, I would have prefered the former. 
 Some parts do achieve greatness however. The stories concerning the characters in Africa are far stronger than the ones set in America, in my opinion. The story revolving around Quey and Cudjo being the standout piece of the novel that could work as an independent short story. Marjorie's story is also the sensation of the novel's second half. However, these glimmers of gold don't save the rest of Homegoing from ultimately being a confused novel. I will put most of its problems down to being a debut. It's easy to see Yaa Gyasi's potential in Homegoing and thus I will admit that I await her next book with hope.