Sankofa

I received a digital advance readers copy of Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo via NetGalley. Sankofa is scheduled for release on October 5, 2021.

Sankofa is a woman in search of her lost personal history. She has recently separated from her husband, her daughter is out in the world as an adult, and her mother has just died. While processing her mother’s possessions, Sankofa finds the identity of her unknown father and sets out on a quest to find him and connect her present to her past.

For me, Sankofa was a well written and very relatable character. While on the surface, she appears to have control of her life and who she is, underneath she swirls with uncertainty. She is a woman whose roots have pulled loose, as they were in soil too unstable to hold her tight. The characters around Sankofa were less well established, but as the novel was tightly focused on Sankofa’s experience of them and their relationships, this didn’t bother me much.

The story takes place partly in America, with a journey to a small African country. I would have liked to have a bit more of the setting while Sankofa is in Africa, but her experiences there were limited to a small collection of locales.

The plot of this story is largely internal, as we follow Sankofa’s journey into her family history. In the end, the story was resolved in a way that felt out of place for me. It felt like a large shift in the genre of the story that did not match what had come before. It worked in terms of theme, but was difficult to absorb in terms of plot and style of the story, and pulled me out of Sankofa’s journey rather than giving the story a satisfying ending.

Overall, Sankofa was a good exploration of a woman’s search for her true roots. I am curious if other readers had the same experience with the resolution of the novel.