Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi – Audio

Book Blurb:

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.

My Review: 3.5 stars

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Transcendent Kingdom took on addiction, the church and mental illness. Sounds like fun, right?

Although not fun at all, this book was wildly interesting. Gifty is one of the brightest and most unique characters that I’ve read about in a long time. She’s a neuroscience researcher studying award seeking behavior to better understand addiction, which ultimately led to her brother’s overdose and subsequent death.

She’s caught in a life of parenting her parent, who is suffering from severe depression. She’s eleven. Her life is not easy, growing up as a child of religious Ghanaian immigrants and knowing she wasn’t wanted. Her brother, Nana, was the golden son and Gifty was an unwelcome surprise.

As she unspools her life on the page, we learn about the family dynamics and her work at the lab. I found the work she did at the lab to be fascinating and hopeful. Studies like these are what we need for understanding and curing addiction. The story was bogged down with the many scientific and doctoral studies that she shared throughout the book.

For as much as I enjoyed certain aspects of this book, there were others where I was flat-out bored. It was difficult to avoid a comparison of this book to her debut novel, Homegoing, which was a pure 5 star gem. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Still, I’ll read what she writes next as she has a magical way with words.

Quotes I liked:

I want everything and I want to want less.”

“We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.”

“If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”

“In just that short amount of time, Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all of our lives revolved. I didn’t want to stare directly at it.”

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s hard to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”