en-US Thu, 03 Oct 2024 04:24:57 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 27071490 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

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.]]> 305 Yaa Gyasi L 5 4.48 2016
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: L
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: abandoned, historical-fiction, i-m-just-not-in-the-mood, social-issue-relevant
review:
Clearly, this is an important book. It's powerful. It's very well written. But I just can't do it. It's heart wrenching, and I sort of can't take it right now. I'll have to come back to it sometime.
]]> 31306273 384 Harding Traci 073229942X L 0 3.75
author: Harding Traci
name: L
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/08
shelves: abandoned, i-m-just-not-in-the-mood
review:

]]> 60021442
For as long as Lucia Gomez has been the police chief in the city of Highland Isle, near Kindle County, she has known that any woman in law enforcement must walk a precarious line between authority and camaraderie to gain respect.Ìý She has maintained a spotless reputation—until now. Three male police officers have accused her of soliciting sex in exchange for promotions to higher ranks. With few people left who she can trust, Chief Gomez turns to an old friend, Rik Dudek, to act as her attorney in the federal grand jury investigation, insisting to Rik that the accusations against her are part of an ugly smear campaign designed to destroy her career and empower her enemies—both outside the police force and within..
Ìý
Clarice “Pinkyâ€� Granum spent most of her youth experimenting with an impressive array of drugs and failing out of various professions, including the police academy. Pinky knows that in the eyes of most people, she's nothing but a screwup—but she doesn't trust most people's opinions anyway. Moreover, she finally has a respectable-enough job as a licensed P.I. working for Rik on his roster of mostly minor cases, like workman's comp, DUIs and bar fights. Rik's shabby office and even shabbier cases are a far cry from the kinds of high-profile criminal matters Pinky became familiar with in the law office of her grandfather, Sandy Stern. But Rik and Pinky feel that Chief Gomez’s case, which has attracted national attention, is their chance to break into the legal big leagues. ÌýÌýÌý
Ìý
Guided by her gut instinct and razor-sharp investigative skills, Pinky dives headfirst into a twisted scandal that will draw her into the deepest recesses of the city’s criminal networks, as well as the human mind. But she will need every scrap of tenacity and courage to unravel the dark secrets those closest to her are determined to keep hidden.]]> 439 Scott Turow 1538706326 L 2 3.51 2022
author: Scott Turow
name: L
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2023/02/26
shelves: mystery, i-m-just-not-in-the-mood, not-my-cup-of-tea
review:

]]> 55964195 Hell of a Book, an African-American author sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Jason Mott's novel and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: since his novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour.

Throughout, these characters' stories build and build and as they converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art, and money, there always is the tragic story of a police shooting playing over and over on the news.

Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably powerful, an electrifying high-wire act, ideal for book clubs, and the book Mott says he has been writing in his head for ten years, Hell of a Book in its final twists truly becomes its title.]]> 323 Jason Mott 059333096X L 0 4.00 2021
author: Jason Mott
name: L
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/01
shelves: i-m-just-not-in-the-mood, mainstream-lit-etc, abandoned
review:

]]> 21535490 Featuring brand-new stories by: Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey, Lee Child, Alex Barclay, Brian McGilloway, Ian McDonald, Arlene Hunt, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Claire McGowan, Steve Cavanagh, Lucy Caldwell, Sam Millar, and Gerard Brennan.

From the introduction by Adrian McKinty & Stuart Neville:

Few European cities have had as disturbed and violent a history as Belfast over the last half-century. For much of that time the Troubles (1968�1998) dominated life in Ireland's second-biggest population centre, and during the darkest days of the conflict--in the 1970s and 1980s--riots, bombings, and indiscriminate shootings were tragically commonplace. The British army patrolled the streets in armoured vehicles and civilians were searched for guns and explosives before they were allowed entry into the shopping district of the city centre...Belfast is still a city divided...

You can see Belfast's bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display. You want noir? How about a painting the size of a house, a portrait of a man known to have murdered at least a dozen human beings in cold blood? Or a similar house-sized gable painting of a zombie marching across a post-apocalyptic wasteland with an AK-47 over the legend UVF: Prepared for Peace--Ready for War. As Lee Child has said, Belfast is still 'the most noir place on earth.'"
]]> 218 Adrian McKinty 1617752916 L 3 i-m-just-not-in-the-mood 3.64 2014
author: Adrian McKinty
name: L
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/09
date added: 2021/03/15
shelves: i-m-just-not-in-the-mood
review:
Last one on my "currently reading" list that I'm not reading at all. This is just too dark for pandemic reading. Maybe later. So my list will say I'm finished, even though I'm not.
]]> 6085704 By the author of Dare Me and The End of Everything

In October 1931, a station agent found two large trunks abandoned in Los Angeles' Southern Pacific Station. What he found inside ignited one of the most scandalous tabloid sensations of the decade.

Inspired by this notorious true crime, Edgar-winning author Megan Abbott's novel Bury Me Deep is the story of Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her doctor husband. At the medical clinic where she finds a job, Marion becomes fast friends with Louise, a vivacious nurse, and her roommate, Ginny, a tubercular blonde. Before long, the demure Marion is swept up in the exuberant life of the girls, who supplement their scant income by entertaining the town's most powerful men with wild parties. At one of these events, Marion meets, and falls hard for, the charming Joe Lanigan, a local rogue and politician on the rise, whose ties to all three women bring events to a dangerous collision.

A story born of Jazz Age decadence and Depression-era desperation, Bury Me Deep, with its hothouse of jealousy, illicit sex and shifting loyalties, is a timeless portrait of the dark side of desire and the glimmer of redemption.]]> 255 Megan Abbott 1416599096 L 0 3.67 2009
author: Megan Abbott
name: L
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2020/03/05
shelves: abandoned, i-m-just-not-in-the-mood
review:

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