Transcendent Kingdom: A Read with Jenna Pick: 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.

thenextgoodbook.com
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 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.

transcendent. would recommend.