Transcendent Kingdom: A novel

As Gifty finishes her grad school work her Mother comes to live with her and she explores components of her life from childhood to adult that has brought her to her current life decisions. An easy read that makes you think about how the actions of others can affect you indirectly.

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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
264 pages

What’s it about?
Gifty is sixth-year PhD candidate at Stanford University School of Medicine studying neuroscience. Her interest is in reward seeking behavior and addiction. Alternating between the past and the present this is a story of a family grappling with the many facets of mental health.

What did it make me think about?
I loved Gifty! What a great character. She was so complicated, and yet so refreshing. "He smiled at me, and I wanted to slap the smile off his face, but I wanted other things more."

Should I read it?
I highly recommend this book. It is a family story first- but it also sheds light on addiction, depression, religion, and being an immigrant in the Deep South. What a combination...

Quote-
"But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world thought a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."

If you liked this try-
Dominicana by Angie Cruz
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett
​Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

I do read a lot of books by black and immigrant authors, mostly as a means to expand my perspectives. It's a meager attempt on my end that I hope boosts the awareness to get it in the right hands of the ones who will resonate the most with it. It's incredibly rare for these stories to single me out, because I am a Southern Christian White American Woman. But this one turned a corner and swung back into some Very Personal territory.
Transcendent Kingdom was one of September 2020's Book of the Month's selections, and I had a hard time picking the book I wanted that month. In the end, I picked something else but put Transcendent Kingdom on my library hold's list instead.

☞ Btw, about Book of The Month Club - if you aren't already a member, here's the sitch: basically, you're given an option every month of five new, hardcover books. You pay a flat rate of about $15 for your first book, and $10 for any additional book you add after that. Everyone is different, of course, but so far I haven't gotten any titles that were duds. Worst case, they simple didn't thrill me, but still kept my interests. So really, it's totally worth it! ☜

Transcendent Kingdom is about Gifty - the first generation daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, born in Alabama. Gifty is currently a PhD candidate studying neuroscience at Stanford - this is world's away from her childhood spent in a Southern evangelical church, growing up with her older brother Nana - a basket ball protégé and her single mother. But that was then. Nana has since over-dosed on OxyContin. Her once strong and domineering mother is now a husk of her former self, as she struggles with depression after losing her son. Gifty's work now focuses a more in the interest of addiction and depression, obviously inspired by her family.

However, as a reader I was struck by - and most interested in - how Gifty struggles to discern her place in science while also acknowledging her religion. As a practicing Christian and someone who "isn't a dummy," to put it lightly, I seem to confound the people around me who have long since thrown in their towel's vis a vis religion. There is a lot to say on the matter of being spiritually and educationally homeless, and honestly, no one I know seems to be objective or non-biased enough to actually listen. In this way, Transcendent Kingdom was a revelation for me. Yaa Gyashi may not have said what I would want to say, but at least she has been able to breech the topic in a way I have never been able to before, and for that I am very grateful.

If you enjoyed this review, you can find it and others like it here

I picked up Transcendent Kingdom for a book club and read the physical copy. On the surface, it is exactly my kind of premise with a neuroscience PhD student trying to map reward pathways while carrying the weight of immigrant family expectations, grief, and the long shadow of addiction. In practice, the execution felt like living inside someone else’s head for a few hundred pages. The intimate, inward voice is unique and often poetic, but it also slowed the story to a crawl for me. Gifty’s tug-of-war between science and religion is the book’s heartbeat. If you connect with evangelical church culture or spiritual questioning, that thread may land as deeply personal. I’m not religious, and the heavy focus on scripture, prayer, and salvation talk kept pulling me out of the narrative. I wanted more story on the page and less circling introspection. The science sections, while smart, read so clinically that they sometimes felt like lab notes instead of lived experience. The family dynamics are undeniably heavy with a father who abandons his family, a mother who works herself into emotional absence and then collapses, a brother adored by everyone who dies after an injury spirals into opioid addiction, and a daughter who becomes caretaker without ever being cared for. That’s potent material, and I felt flashes of it, especially around grief and isolation. But character growth never crystallized for me. Gifty often pushes people away, and by the end, I didn’t feel she had earned the final romantic relationship. The late turn toward Han felt more convenient than convincing. I also struggled to buy the elite-academia gauntlet stacked back-to-back. It added polish to her résumé without adding depth to her arc. There are bright spots. The prose can be beautiful line to line. Katherine was my favorite character, and I would have gladly followed her romance with Gifty for another hundred pages. I appreciated the ambition of asking whether the body and the spirit can speak to each other when a family is breaking up. I just wanted the themes to cut deeper into the scenes, consequences, and changes. If your sweet spot is reflective literary fiction with strong spiritual inquiry, this might speak to you more than it did to me. For my taste, it was thoughtful but distant, moving in concept, and muted in effect.

Not as great (phenomenal) as Home going but still good.