I always meant to read Homegoing – I even started it a couple of times – but for some reason I wasn’t able to get very far. I found the audiobook of Transcendent Kingdom available from my library, and it seemed like time for me to give Gyasi’s work another try.
It’s really hard to sum this book up in a few sentences. It’s about a Ghanian-American woman called Gifty who is a budding neuroscientist at Stanford. She spends her days painstakingly testing and observing her test subjects – mice – in an effort to gain scientific understanding of the brain and how it works. But it’s so much more complex than that.
As we learn more about Gifty, we start to understand what led her to this work. Her mother suffers from debilitating mental health issues, and her older brother was addicted to painkillers. Both of their brains are the source of their issues, and yet neither seems able to control them. Gifty seeks to find answers, and to connect through her work to her family.
We learn all of this slowly, as we follow Gifty through her childhood and into the present. We see her struggles, and the struggles of her family. Her relationship with her mother is fraught – her mother is overly exacting and critical, and the two never seem to be at ease in one another’s company. She adored her brother, but could not understand the addiction that slowly stole him from her. And her father gave up on America and returned home to Ghana where he found a new wife and a new life.
All of these elements in Gifty’s past have both strengthened and crippled her. She is detail-oriented and a perfectionist, which serves her well in her work but causes anxiety outside of it. She has trouble connecting to people and her relationships suffer. She doesn’t open up easily, and her need to hold back who she really is means that she is deeply lonely.
I felt so much for Gifty. Her helplessness in the face of her family’s problems and her desperate need to search for answers that she won’t ever really find. Gyasi perfectly captured the subtleties and contradictions of her characters and allows her reader to both connect to and dislike all of her characters at different points. Not an easy balance to maintain, but perfectly executed. It wasn’t an easy or happy story, of course, but it’s one that is worth the effort. It’s delicate, poignant and evocative. Very glad I finally gave Gyasi’s work a try!
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 Ghanaian 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. – Goodreads
Book Title: Transcendent Kingdom
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Knopf
Released: August 31, 2020
Genre: Fiction, Family, Immigration, Addiction
Pages: 264
Date Read: February 5-7, 2021
Rating: 8/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.18/5 (51,208 ratings)
I found this to be a touching story. All the characters were flawed, but they were also extraordinary, too, and I liked them all. I think this book, more than most I read, showed how many parts of are lives can’t be changed but must simply be accepted as they are.
Yes! I totally agree. I commented to this effect on your Goodreads review, but I think the thing I loved most was how it emphasizes that no one is ever the worst thing that has happened to them or an illness they must endure. To see only addiction or mental illness is to miss everything else that makes a person who they are, to erase the beautiful and joyous child they used to be, to deny any future they could have. It’s so important to remember that everyone is more than the most obvious thing about them, and to always look closer and really see people. Everyone in this book is flawed, as you said, but they are also strong, smart, determined, talented characters. I loved that about this book, and I loved how much love Gyasi writes with. I was impressed!