Transcendent Kingdom
Fiction
Knopf Publishing Group
September 1, 2020
Hardcover
288
Purchased
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.
My review:
This author had such huge success with her debut novel Homegoing, I was a bit nervous for her as I opened the cover of her second novel. I had no reason to be, this is an author whose writing transcends (yes, I went there with the play on the title!) so many other fiction novels out there. I was also pleased to see that other than the gorgeous writing and ties to Ghana, this story was not anything like Homegoing. Gyasi takes us into the life of Gifty, a woman working on her phD, a project that involves the effects of reward and addiction on lab mice. Gifty has a lot of internal strife, her brother has died of a drug overdose, her mother is depressed, and her father absconded back to Ghana when she was very young with the promise that he would be coming back. As you can probably tell, this novel is not going to win any uplifting story recommendations, but not so fast.....Gifty's perseverance and rise above it attitude keeps things moving along without it becoming a total downer. I thought the characters were very well formed, and despite the tragedies, I found myself rooting for them to find peace within their lives. A chunk of the book dealt with Gifty's spirituality, which isn't really my thing to read about, but at the same time the lab experiments probably bored other readers, while I found them fascinating. I found the ending to be perfect as I couldn't have handled another story with a depressing ending (here's looking at you A Burning).
Lovely writing and a timely narrative dealing with a woman trying to rise above what could have been her 'lot in life'. Gifty is a character I won't soon forget. I also won't soon forget Yaa Gyasi, who has resoundingly taken her place among the gifted writers of our time.
