Sep 27

Sep 27 Transcendent Kingdom

Author: Yaa Gyasi
Publisher: Knopf
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanain immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief — a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.

TL;DR Review

Approachable but with significant depth, Transcendent Kingdom is contemporary literary fiction at its finest. I really, really enjoyed it, even though it was a tough read at times.

For you if: You are looking for something to make you think and feel, both.

Full Review

“When I was very little, my mother took to calling me asaa, the miracle berry that, when eaten first, turns sour things sweet. Asaa in context is a miracle berry. Without context, it is nothing, does nothing. The sour fruit remains.”

Big thanks to Knopf and Libro.fm for the complimentary audiobook of this one! I listened to it in the car on a road trip, and it was perfect. I loved it.

Transcendent Kingdom is a novel about a woman named Gifty, from a Ghanian immigrant family wracked by abandonment, addiction, overdose, and struggles with mental health. Despite (or perhaps in spite) of all that, she’s pushed herself through a prestigious higher education, and now she’s a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at medical school, studying addiction in mice. Her mother, who has fallen into a severe bout of depression, is sleeping in Gifty’s bed and not eating much. The novel flashes between past and present as Gifty tells us her history and tries to find a way to help her mother.

Some might tell you that this is a novel about the irreconcilable nature of religion and science, as Gifty had an extremely religious childhood and now practices neuroscience, questioning all the time how all of the experiences of her life can be true and valid. But I don’t think that’s quite right. To me, this felt not so much like religion vs science as it felt like, how can you exist in a world with both when the rest of the world believes you need to choose? And it was so grounded in Gifty’s character and experiences that it was interesting and moving despite the fact that I’m not particularly interested in that question or either of those subjects on my own.

The most impressive thing about this novel, to me, was that it read like really good memoir. Gyasi’s storytelling through Gifty’s narration is incredible — her understanding and probing into Gifty’s childhood to peel back layer upon layer of trauma, habit, indoctrination, grief, and love. The insight that Gifty has into what shaped her into the woman she is today — that kind of work is something I’ve only ever seen in memoir.

Make no mistake: This book is not an easy read. It centers on parental abandonment and addiction, relapse, overdose, death, and grief. It will be difficult for those who have struggled with addiction and those who have had addiction impact their families. But if you’re able to read about those topics, then I highly recommend this one, because it will make you feel deeply.