Downtown Springfield Association

Welcome to your new favorite book club! Join the Downtown Springfield Association and the Springfield-Greene County Library District every second Thursday of the month at 6 p.m. for the Downtown Book Club.

April 2023 Pick:

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Description

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.

Content Warnings:

  • Slavery
  • Colonialism
  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Rape
  • Arranged marriage
  • Substance addiction
  • Drug abuse
  • Death of a child
  • Kidnapping
  • Fire
  • War themes

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Previous Reads

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

One Two Three by Laurie Frankel

The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London

The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson

Need a copy of this month’s book? Visit the Park Central Branch of the Springfield-Greene County Library District to grab a copy! Put your request in now, because it may take about a week to get your copy.