Transcendent Kingdom: A novel

The plot of this novel is carefully crafted to pose numerous contrasting life values, characteristics, and situations faced within the narrator’s life. It thus provides an interesting evaluation of the numerous ways people seek meaning and purpose in their lives. At this book's beginning we meet our narrator named Gifty who is nearing the end of her doctoral neuroscience research project at Stanford, and her clinically depressed mother has recently moved to California to live with her daughter. From this beginning point the book's narrative switches to recollections from Gifty’s past life growing up in Huntsville, Alabama. Gifty’s parents were immigrants from Ghana, but she and her brother were raised by their single mother for most of their childhood after their father abandoned the family and returned to Ghana. Gifty’s brother grew tall and became a gifted athlete and was a star high school basketball player. But that came to an abrupt end after he acquired a opioid habit and eventually died of a heroin overdose. Consequently, Gifty’s mother fell into a depression so severe that 11-year-old Gifty was sent to Ghana for a time to live with her aunt. This background partly explains why Gifty’s selected field of scientific research is seeking the physiological switch that causes “issues with reward seeking like the depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough.” Gifty’s academic success has placed her in a world of science that gives little thought to issues related to God and religion which is the extreme opposite from Gifty’s childhood community in Alabama. As a youth Gifty has experienced a spiritual “saved” experience in the Pentecostal church her family attended, and she continues to be on speaking terms with the church pastor from those years. Meanwhile her mother who has recently moved into Gifty’s California apartment has sunk into a second episode of depression and continues to resist psychiatric services prompted partly by her religious beliefs. The following are a listing of the “contrasting life values, characteristics, and situations” referenced in the first sentence of this review. These are the issues I identified in the story, but there’s more than one way to pair these things up. Others can probably identify some that I missed. Academically Gifted—Negative Black Stereotypes African Immigrant — White Privilege Atheist — Fundamentalist Christian Biblical Literalism — Liberal Christianity Depression — Drug High Facts — Faith Freewill — Neurological Programming Ghanaian — American Human Soul — Human Brain Isolated/Alone — Family/Community Saved (spiritually) — Sexual Experience Science — Religion Self Control — Addiction Spirit Moved — Control Freak Wanted Son — Unwanted Daughter The book’s narration provides an insightful exploration of life’s dilemmas in language that will provide a fresh perspective for many readers. It's a reminder of the variety of ways people can live a life with meaning. Throughout Transcendent Kingdom, the author Gyasi tackles a complex web of themes while moving slowly toward something of a conclusion. It’s interesting to note that her neurological experiments have found a way to intervene in the lives of her test mice to stop addictive behavior. This is obviously a needed intervention for many people, and in Gifty’s case could have saved her brother’s life. A similar sort of neurological intervention could perhaps cure clinical depression. The nonfiction basis for the referenced neurological experiments is contained in this (view spoiler). The book does not say how easily this neurological intervention could be transferred to humans, but it reminded me of the book, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening , by John Elder Robison. Robison describes how his autistic spectrum characteristics were temporarily ended with the application of magnetic waves to a portion of his brain. For a conclusion this book's story hops over a couple undescribed years during which all unanswered questions have apparently been resolved, ignored, or perhaps simply left unexplained. It leaves the reader with a happy feeling, but doesn’t exactly answer all life’s questions that have been raised in the book. It's interesting to note that the author is Ghanaian-American, grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and has an undergraduate degree from Stanford. She has obviously constructed this fictional story around the basic outline of her own life.

This woman did her research on neuro science that's evident in her writing. I'm interested in neuro psychology anyway so this hit the spot for me. Pay attention to the psychology of the heroine she has lots of layers

Gifty’s big brother Nana, a championship basketball player, was just a few years away from a likely berth in the NBA when he died of a heroin overdose, and her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, had lain depressed in bed for years. So, it’s unsurprising that she herself had turned to a career in neuroscience to study addiction and depression. She’s now in her sixth year of graduate school at Stanford, mapping reward-seeking behavior in mice by inserting electrodes into their brains to assess their reactions to electrical shocks when they eat too often. And Gifty is brilliant, having already published two papers in Nature and one in Cell. But she is no closer to understanding what had afflicted her family. In Transcendent Kingdom, the talented Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi explores questions science cannot answer. “Whenever I think of my mother,” Yaa Gyasi writes in the lede to this novel, “I picture a queen-sized bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room.” Gifty’s father, whom she calls the Chin Chin Man, had abandoned the family and returned to Africa, upending her mother’s life. Then Nana’s death only drives her more deeply into depression. She now spends months on end barely moving from her bed. All the while Gifty seeks answers from the science that now fills her life, she yearns for the fundamentalist Christian faith in which she had been raised in Alabama. She is slow to make friends at Stanford. A medical school colleague named Katherine, a psychiatrist, pursues her and at length gets her to open up, but only grudgingly. And her labmate, Han, appears unsympathetic at first but gradually warms up. However, neither can fully understand the grief and yearning that motivate her. Nor can her Aunt Joyce, who hosts her on an extended trip back to Africa when her mother insists she leave. Transcendent Kingdom is about love, religion, the challenges faced by an immigrant family, and questions science cannot answer. Yaa Gyasi clearly understands these things. About the author Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi won a passel of literary awards for her brilliant debut novel, Homegoing. From the age of ten, she was raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where much of Transcendent Kingdom is set. She holds a B.A. from Stanford and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Although Gyasi has Ghanaian roots like Gifty, she must have undertaken considerable research in neuroscience to write Transcendent Kingdom.

ne woman's reckoning with her family of origin, its dysfunctional aspects, a suicidal mother, a tragic event with a brother, science, and so much more. I had a feeling I would like TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM (Knopf, September 2020), I had no idea how much I would *LOVE* TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM. Yaa Gyasi is an immensely talented writer who tells a dark story with such luminous grace and compassion. Quick take: Gifty is a sixth-year neuroscience PhD candidateat the Stanford University School of Medicine. She's studying the reward-seeking behavior of mice and the neural circuits in depression and anxiety and addiction, and with good reason. As often the case, many scientists study what they study because they have somehow been touched by the issues personally. In Gifty's case, it's her family members who have. Gifty's brother, Nana, was a talented athlete with much promise, but before all of that, the family immigrated from Ghana to Alabama (and then on to California). Here, we become immersed in the deep south, the unique aspects of sports in this part of the country, but also religion and racism. Still, Gifty is a thoughtful observer, brilliant in her own right, and is plagued with many of her own questions of spirituality and science, guilt, and more. As Gifty grows older, she is determined to discover the scientific basis for suffering--of which she is keenly aware. The structure of TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM meanders and spirals, there is no direct path, and this, I think adds to the story. We see, first-hand Gifty's evolution and journey in becoming the woman she is in the end, because all of these events--our childhood shape us. Told in first person, TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM is an intimate portrayal of faith, science, dysfunction, family, love, immigration, loss, grief, guilt, and so much more. I had to remind myself that this is not a memoir, although I think it's evident the author borrowed from her own experiences, as we writers tend to do. What a gift this book is. Be patient with it--it's a slower, more contemplative read, but provides so many thinking--and talking points--and will most certainly leave a residue. I was reminded, in part, of the work of Chloe Benjamin in THE IMMORTALISTS (particularly the science pieces) but also some connection to Maya Shanbhag Lang's WHAT WE CARRY meets Cara Wall's THE DEARLY BELOVED. L.Lindsay|Always with a Book

Gyasi has written an incredible book filled with so many understated dichotomies. This book follows a girl named Gifty as her family leaves Ghana for Huntsville, Alabama. The family struggles with racism, addiction, mental health issues, and communicating effectively with each other. Gifty grows up veeeery conservatively in a Pentecostal church and then eventually becomes a neuroscientist, so religion and science make up a huge part of herself. Gifty is such an interesting narrator and Gyasi writes her internal dialogue beautifully. She’s been repressed and ignored her whole life so she’s nonchalant about many huge things in her life. There are constantly sentences that are so short, but you know they could be fleshed out into their own chapter. Gyasi captures Gifty’s personality so well in the things she doesn’t write. One of my favorite things about this book is that there are tons of quotes that are so profound that I highlighted AND underlined them. Like, I hollered out, “YES!” a few times in solidarity. The thing that I love the most about this book though is when Gifty talks about science and religion. Can you believe in both? Can you run a lab and pray to a higher power? She sees the beauty of God’s creation in her neuroscience experiments, yet where was He and the church when her mother and brother were struggling? There are so many tough, tough things that she addresses and I found it powerful and extremely relatable as a person of faith that has struggled and grown frustrated with hypocrisy and hate within churches. Overall, I thought this was a beautiful book and I’m looking forward to reading her other book Homegoing soon (which I could have SWORN was titled Homecoming and I’m pretty sure I’m being gaslighted right now 🤣).

One of the things I deeply respected about Homegoing was Yaa Gyasi's ability to mimic the themes of the story in the way she told it: cyclic, multi-layered, parallel through time, subtle in the perstence of trauma. Gyasi does something similar with Transcendent Kingdom: the storytelling seems to mimic the slow, persistent sadness, longing, and insecurity of loving someone with addiction, then someone with deep, unreachable depression. While I agree with the descriptions of negative reviews - particulary that its slow (the book seems aimless until about 60% of the way through) and without the emotional climaxes of Homegoing, by the end I was left deeply reflective. I was surprised to find myself despairing during the emotional peak with Giftys mother, which happens in flashbacks. In this almost detached and "unaffected" (good word) storytelling I found clues to empathize with the complex emotional trauma of loving and losing someone who grounded you (in an unwelcoming world) to addiction: a measured resistance to trusting feelings or intimacy (compounded by the immigrant resistance to expressing feelings), betrayed by bursts (then negotiation of) desire for it. The repression of hope, interrupted by memories of when one had the audacity for it. This is present everywhere, from Giftys relationship with her father, her religion, her diary, her brother, mom, friends. Slow, objective, measured, interrupted by desires/hope, defeated and withdrawn on the surface but persistently, desperately seeking something to trust (science, the only thing left) in the undercurrent. All that might give clues to what it means to lose trust in every intimate bond that shapes your identity at such a young age. Because of that ability to use the shape of a story to show the complexity of emotional trauma (+immigrant black experience) again, I was floored by Yaa Gyasi.

Gyasi's novels are compelling, entertaining, educational, and more. Always offering the characters and the readers a heaping dose of empathy. Read this book.

It took me months to get through this book. Not because it was bad, but because it reminded me of my brother who died 5 years ago after struggling with substance use. She captures so much the trials and triumphs of mental illness and the loss that usually surrounds it.

Took super long to get here despite prime shipping, pages uneven, finger prints at bottom. Heard its an amazing book but my lord whoeven distributes her books needs to be fires asap

The intersection of religion and science is crooked if not actually broken. In a way, this book tries to make that intersection whole and seamless. And the result is magnificent. This is a short but monumental novel that has so much depth, so many profound thoughts, and a message so intricate and intense that I think I could read it over and over and still find something new in it each time. Written by Yaa Gyasi, this is the story of Gifty, a brilliant 28-year-old woman—Harvard undergrad, Stanford PhD in neuroscience—who is deeply plagued by the death of her beloved brother, Nana, from an OxyContin addiction and overdose. Gifty was born in Huntsville, Alabama, but her parents and brother are immigrants from Ghana. The story begins when Gifty is a graduate student at Stanford, but seamlessly bounces around in time from her childhood and teen years in Alabama, college at Harvard, and back to the present in San Francisco. Gifty's suicidal mother shows up at her San Francisco apartment nearly comatose from grief—even though this is years after Nana's death. As Gifty valiantly tries to care for her clinically depressed mother, she struggles with the big questions of life, especially those revolving around her evangelical Christian upbringing and how God does—or doesn't—fit into the life of a neuroscientist who is researching the brain-based science of addiction. This is a profound, elegiac examination of the human spirit after it has been crushed by grief and a powerful statement about the ravages of opioids. While parts of the book are absolutely heartbreaking, the ultimate message of hope and love is transcendent.

The plot of this novel is carefully crafted to pose numerous contrasting life values, characteristics, and situations faced within the narrator’s life. It thus provides an interesting evaluation of the numerous ways people seek meaning and purpose in their lives. At this book's beginning we meet our narrator named Gifty who is nearing the end of her doctoral neuroscience research project at Stanford, and her clinically depressed mother has recently moved to California to live with her daughter. From this beginning point the book's narrative switches to recollections from Gifty’s past life growing up in Huntsville, Alabama. Gifty’s parents were immigrants from Ghana, but she and her brother were raised by their single mother for most of their childhood after their father abandoned the family and returned to Ghana. Gifty’s brother grew tall and became a gifted athlete and was a star high school basketball player. But that came to an abrupt end after he acquired a opioid habit and eventually died of a heroin overdose. Consequently, Gifty’s mother fell into a depression so severe that 11-year-old Gifty was sent to Ghana for a time to live with her aunt. This background partly explains why Gifty’s selected field of scientific research is seeking the physiological switch that causes “issues with reward seeking like the depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough.” Gifty’s academic success has placed her in a world of science that gives little thought to issues related to God and religion which is the extreme opposite from Gifty’s childhood community in Alabama. As a youth Gifty has experienced a spiritual “saved” experience in the Pentecostal church her family attended, and she continues to be on speaking terms with the church pastor from those years. Meanwhile her mother who has recently moved into Gifty’s California apartment has sunk into a second episode of depression and continues to resist psychiatric services prompted partly by her religious beliefs. The following are a listing of the “contrasting life values, characteristics, and situations” referenced in the first sentence of this review. These are the issues I identified in the story, but there’s more than one way to pair these things up. Others can probably identify some that I missed. Academically Gifted—Negative Black Stereotypes African Immigrant — White Privilege Atheist — Fundamentalist Christian Biblical Literalism — Liberal Christianity Depression — Drug High Facts — Faith Freewill — Neurological Programming Ghanaian — American Human Soul — Human Brain Isolated/Alone — Family/Community Saved (spiritually) — Sexual Experience Science — Religion Self Control — Addiction Spirit Moved — Control Freak Wanted Son — Unwanted Daughter The book’s narration provides an insightful exploration of life’s dilemmas in language that will provide a fresh perspective for many readers. It's a reminder of the variety of ways people can live a life with meaning. Throughout Transcendent Kingdom, the author Gyasi tackles a complex web of themes while moving slowly toward something of a conclusion. It’s interesting to note that her neurological experiments have found a way to intervene in the lives of her test mice to stop addictive behavior. This is obviously a needed intervention for many people, and in Gifty’s case could have saved her brother’s life. A similar sort of neurological intervention could perhaps cure clinical depression. The nonfiction basis for the referenced neurological experiments is contained in this (view spoiler). The book does not say how easily this neurological intervention could be transferred to humans, but it reminded me of the book, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening , by John Elder Robison. Robison describes how his autistic spectrum characteristics were temporarily ended with the application of magnetic waves to a portion of his brain. For a conclusion this book's story hops over a couple undescribed years during which all unanswered questions have apparently been resolved, ignored, or perhaps simply left unexplained. It leaves the reader with a happy feeling, but doesn’t exactly answer all life’s questions that have been raised in the book. It's interesting to note that the author is Ghanaian-American, grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and has an undergraduate degree from Stanford. She has obviously constructed this fictional story around the basic outline of her own life.

This woman did her research on neuro science that's evident in her writing. I'm interested in neuro psychology anyway so this hit the spot for me. Pay attention to the psychology of the heroine she has lots of layers

Gifty’s big brother Nana, a championship basketball player, was just a few years away from a likely berth in the NBA when he died of a heroin overdose, and her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, had lain depressed in bed for years. So, it’s unsurprising that she herself had turned to a career in neuroscience to study addiction and depression. She’s now in her sixth year of graduate school at Stanford, mapping reward-seeking behavior in mice by inserting electrodes into their brains to assess their reactions to electrical shocks when they eat too often. And Gifty is brilliant, having already published two papers in Nature and one in Cell. But she is no closer to understanding what had afflicted her family. In Transcendent Kingdom, the talented Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi explores questions science cannot answer. “Whenever I think of my mother,” Yaa Gyasi writes in the lede to this novel, “I picture a queen-sized bed with her lying in it, a practiced stillness filling the room.” Gifty’s father, whom she calls the Chin Chin Man, had abandoned the family and returned to Africa, upending her mother’s life. Then Nana’s death only drives her more deeply into depression. She now spends months on end barely moving from her bed. All the while Gifty seeks answers from the science that now fills her life, she yearns for the fundamentalist Christian faith in which she had been raised in Alabama. She is slow to make friends at Stanford. A medical school colleague named Katherine, a psychiatrist, pursues her and at length gets her to open up, but only grudgingly. And her labmate, Han, appears unsympathetic at first but gradually warms up. However, neither can fully understand the grief and yearning that motivate her. Nor can her Aunt Joyce, who hosts her on an extended trip back to Africa when her mother insists she leave. Transcendent Kingdom is about love, religion, the challenges faced by an immigrant family, and questions science cannot answer. Yaa Gyasi clearly understands these things. About the author Ghanaian-American novelist Yaa Gyasi won a passel of literary awards for her brilliant debut novel, Homegoing. From the age of ten, she was raised in Huntsville, Alabama, where much of Transcendent Kingdom is set. She holds a B.A. from Stanford and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Although Gyasi has Ghanaian roots like Gifty, she must have undertaken considerable research in neuroscience to write Transcendent Kingdom.

ne woman's reckoning with her family of origin, its dysfunctional aspects, a suicidal mother, a tragic event with a brother, science, and so much more. I had a feeling I would like TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM (Knopf, September 2020), I had no idea how much I would *LOVE* TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM. Yaa Gyasi is an immensely talented writer who tells a dark story with such luminous grace and compassion. Quick take: Gifty is a sixth-year neuroscience PhD candidateat the Stanford University School of Medicine. She's studying the reward-seeking behavior of mice and the neural circuits in depression and anxiety and addiction, and with good reason. As often the case, many scientists study what they study because they have somehow been touched by the issues personally. In Gifty's case, it's her family members who have. Gifty's brother, Nana, was a talented athlete with much promise, but before all of that, the family immigrated from Ghana to Alabama (and then on to California). Here, we become immersed in the deep south, the unique aspects of sports in this part of the country, but also religion and racism. Still, Gifty is a thoughtful observer, brilliant in her own right, and is plagued with many of her own questions of spirituality and science, guilt, and more. As Gifty grows older, she is determined to discover the scientific basis for suffering--of which she is keenly aware. The structure of TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM meanders and spirals, there is no direct path, and this, I think adds to the story. We see, first-hand Gifty's evolution and journey in becoming the woman she is in the end, because all of these events--our childhood shape us. Told in first person, TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM is an intimate portrayal of faith, science, dysfunction, family, love, immigration, loss, grief, guilt, and so much more. I had to remind myself that this is not a memoir, although I think it's evident the author borrowed from her own experiences, as we writers tend to do. What a gift this book is. Be patient with it--it's a slower, more contemplative read, but provides so many thinking--and talking points--and will most certainly leave a residue. I was reminded, in part, of the work of Chloe Benjamin in THE IMMORTALISTS (particularly the science pieces) but also some connection to Maya Shanbhag Lang's WHAT WE CARRY meets Cara Wall's THE DEARLY BELOVED. L.Lindsay|Always with a Book

Gyasi has written an incredible book filled with so many understated dichotomies. This book follows a girl named Gifty as her family leaves Ghana for Huntsville, Alabama. The family struggles with racism, addiction, mental health issues, and communicating effectively with each other. Gifty grows up veeeery conservatively in a Pentecostal church and then eventually becomes a neuroscientist, so religion and science make up a huge part of herself. Gifty is such an interesting narrator and Gyasi writes her internal dialogue beautifully. She’s been repressed and ignored her whole life so she’s nonchalant about many huge things in her life. There are constantly sentences that are so short, but you know they could be fleshed out into their own chapter. Gyasi captures Gifty’s personality so well in the things she doesn’t write. One of my favorite things about this book is that there are tons of quotes that are so profound that I highlighted AND underlined them. Like, I hollered out, “YES!” a few times in solidarity. The thing that I love the most about this book though is when Gifty talks about science and religion. Can you believe in both? Can you run a lab and pray to a higher power? She sees the beauty of God’s creation in her neuroscience experiments, yet where was He and the church when her mother and brother were struggling? There are so many tough, tough things that she addresses and I found it powerful and extremely relatable as a person of faith that has struggled and grown frustrated with hypocrisy and hate within churches. Overall, I thought this was a beautiful book and I’m looking forward to reading her other book Homegoing soon (which I could have SWORN was titled Homecoming and I’m pretty sure I’m being gaslighted right now 🤣).

One of the things I deeply respected about Homegoing was Yaa Gyasi's ability to mimic the themes of the story in the way she told it: cyclic, multi-layered, parallel through time, subtle in the perstence of trauma. Gyasi does something similar with Transcendent Kingdom: the storytelling seems to mimic the slow, persistent sadness, longing, and insecurity of loving someone with addiction, then someone with deep, unreachable depression. While I agree with the descriptions of negative reviews - particulary that its slow (the book seems aimless until about 60% of the way through) and without the emotional climaxes of Homegoing, by the end I was left deeply reflective. I was surprised to find myself despairing during the emotional peak with Giftys mother, which happens in flashbacks. In this almost detached and "unaffected" (good word) storytelling I found clues to empathize with the complex emotional trauma of loving and losing someone who grounded you (in an unwelcoming world) to addiction: a measured resistance to trusting feelings or intimacy (compounded by the immigrant resistance to expressing feelings), betrayed by bursts (then negotiation of) desire for it. The repression of hope, interrupted by memories of when one had the audacity for it. This is present everywhere, from Giftys relationship with her father, her religion, her diary, her brother, mom, friends. Slow, objective, measured, interrupted by desires/hope, defeated and withdrawn on the surface but persistently, desperately seeking something to trust (science, the only thing left) in the undercurrent. All that might give clues to what it means to lose trust in every intimate bond that shapes your identity at such a young age. Because of that ability to use the shape of a story to show the complexity of emotional trauma (+immigrant black experience) again, I was floored by Yaa Gyasi.

Gyasi's novels are compelling, entertaining, educational, and more. Always offering the characters and the readers a heaping dose of empathy. Read this book.

It took me months to get through this book. Not because it was bad, but because it reminded me of my brother who died 5 years ago after struggling with substance use. She captures so much the trials and triumphs of mental illness and the loss that usually surrounds it.

Took super long to get here despite prime shipping, pages uneven, finger prints at bottom. Heard its an amazing book but my lord whoeven distributes her books needs to be fires asap

The intersection of religion and science is crooked if not actually broken. In a way, this book tries to make that intersection whole and seamless. And the result is magnificent. This is a short but monumental novel that has so much depth, so many profound thoughts, and a message so intricate and intense that I think I could read it over and over and still find something new in it each time. Written by Yaa Gyasi, this is the story of Gifty, a brilliant 28-year-old woman—Harvard undergrad, Stanford PhD in neuroscience—who is deeply plagued by the death of her beloved brother, Nana, from an OxyContin addiction and overdose. Gifty was born in Huntsville, Alabama, but her parents and brother are immigrants from Ghana. The story begins when Gifty is a graduate student at Stanford, but seamlessly bounces around in time from her childhood and teen years in Alabama, college at Harvard, and back to the present in San Francisco. Gifty's suicidal mother shows up at her San Francisco apartment nearly comatose from grief—even though this is years after Nana's death. As Gifty valiantly tries to care for her clinically depressed mother, she struggles with the big questions of life, especially those revolving around her evangelical Christian upbringing and how God does—or doesn't—fit into the life of a neuroscientist who is researching the brain-based science of addiction. This is a profound, elegiac examination of the human spirit after it has been crushed by grief and a powerful statement about the ravages of opioids. While parts of the book are absolutely heartbreaking, the ultimate message of hope and love is transcendent.

The book was a mixture of my life, my love and my hope. Having lost my beloved husband of 30+years to vivid19 in 2021, February, I thought my life was over. I saw nothing but doom while loved ones, family and friends saw strength and faith. Thank you for such a wonderful book that came when I was at a tipping edge. Great work.

This was my first novel by Yaa Gyasi and I read it for book club. I felt like I was reading a real memoir. Beautiful writing, such a reminder that we never know the burdens others are carrying.

I wanted to give this book five stars but it felt as if Yaa was consumed with another project during the last quarter of the story. While reading Transcendent Kingdom I found myself relating to the blind faith of a higher power, the pain from the loss of a soul through opioids, and the utter collapse of our beliefs when life hands us a brutal hand. I wish there was a more redemptive quality to this story though. I'm glad Gifty was able to motivate herself to open a lab in New Jersey and marry Han. Her drive to figure out the addictive mind after her brother's death led to an in depth study of mice. This was powerful but didn't relay the power of the subject from the parts to the whole. Yaa is a very talented and intelligent writer. I hope she continues to write at a high level for a long time.

On a scale of cotton candy to Brussels sprouts, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi is a sweet and salty trail mix. Every bite crunches, and before you know it, you've eaten the whole bag. Gifty, a PhD candidate for neuroscience at Stanford University, studies reward-seeking behavior in mice and the corresponding brain pathways. Her brother's overdose and her mother's ongoing depression haunts her life, and she's intent on finding a solution to solving suffering. She finds comfort in her lab, but Gifty longs for the promise of salvation that she learned in her childhood evangelical church. At every turn, she grapples with her own existence. Earlier this year, I read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and that story gripped me — though it was not dynamic or climatic in the way I usually expect in books, it was memorable — unforgettable. I knew I had to read Transcendent Kingdom. With prose that sometimes reads more like poetry, Yaa Gyasi weaves a story of humanity, questions, family, faith, and science. Stark moments framed slow awakenings and realizations. I'm unlikely to recover from this story soon, and it strikes me as hallowed ground. I want more stories like this one.

This is a good book though it doesn't rise to the level of Gyasi's other book, "Homegoing." I'm not a big fan of religion especially the evangelical kind. Since Evangelical Christianity is a prominent feature of this book, I found this to be a detraction. It was difficult for me to relate to the religious aspects of the story. But Gyasi really takes you into the heart of Gifty (the narrator), her family, and her family's battles with addiction and mental illness. I felt like I really wanted to know Gifty despite her flaws. I found myself liking her even though she comes across as a little cold. You ache for her and the fraught times she had with her family and her troubled childhood. This book absolutely holds your attention though you may not like the ending. Recommended for those times when you want to read a serious novel.

I may be among the minority of readers who feel that this book is even better than Yaa Gyasi's previous novel Homegoing. This is a young writer who deserves every once of praise. In Transcendent Kingdom, Gyasi explores themes of loss, love, grief, mental health, science, religion, and addiction. The most remarkable aspect of Transcendent Kingdom is the insightful way in which each of these themes are elegantly explored and addressed in a novel length book. Rather than focus on just one of these complex subjects, they are interwoven throughout the book in the same way that the each become intertwined in our lives. The portions of the story that I found particularly meaningful were focused on the interplay of religion and science. Is it possible to reconcile conflicting facts with deep faith? Can we find meaning in belief that appears to be contradicted by modern discovery? The protagonist of this story learns to do just that.

The author weaved an extraordinary human immigration story, mental health, drug addiction, Christianity, and molecular biology in such a manner that its a masterpiece about life.

Yaa Gyasi has a really dope, fluid writing style. I dig it very much! This book has so many relatable topics for me. I have highlighted, bookmarked, and written notes on almost every page! This book was triggering and cathartic!

Gyasi is a powerful writer. I could not put the book down!

This book was a page turner. I didn’t want to stop reading. I wanted to find out what’s going to happen. I was holding my breath a few time’s while reading certain parts of the book. My husband is Ghanaian and I’m familiar with some of the Ghanaian’s towns that were mentioned in the book. I also learned a few Twi words. I loved reading about the correlation between science and relation.

I loved this book! There was interesting info on research to decode neurological basis of depression and drug abuse as well as her spiritual struggles over time. Especially interesting as I have family in Huntsville, Al.

I didn't like this book at all. It was a horrible disappointment to find that the author had moved from the epic scope and purpose of Homegoing to this meandering god-bothering navel-gazing. So skillfully written, but essentially a melodrama.

For liesure reading

A well written book about a family struggle with addiction. The references to Ghana were informative. The main character, Gifty, was very believable. You could feel her pain about her older brother’s overdose. We learn about the science of addiction as Gifty devotes her life studying it. I feel as if I lived in her shoes. That’s good writing

I’m still not sure what to make of this book. I swing between feeling sorry for Gifty and the challenges she experienced as the unwanted child of an immigrant and getting angry that she wallows in self pity, angry at God and the poor hand she feels life has dealt her. The story ebbs and flows between the past and the present in a way that sometimes makes it difficult to keep track of the plot. I came away feeling that the entire book was made up of the musings of a deeply disturbed mind in need of redemption.

This novel kept my attention throughout. It was well written, and the characters were thoroughly developed. It touches on many issues including spirituality, religion, addiction and family dynamics. I definitely could relate to the main character in the novel, Gifty.

A beautifully moving story, tragic but reflective as well. I love the way the author takes a story that we've all heard - a family torn apart by mental illness and addiction - and reveals the underlying layers of identity, alienation, and displacement that aren't often included in the "opioid epidemic" narrative. I study neuroscience too, so I'm thrilled that this angle was highlighted in the book. I found the characters relatable and multidimensional, and the plot riveting even though the story jumps between three different developmental periods in the protagonist's life. The references to Ghanaian culture were awesome but I feel like any family that has ever immigrated or experienced inter-generational disconnect will see themselves in the struggles described here. Each chapter adds a deeper understanding of how the family processed pain, loss, religion, culture, their own relationships, and mental health. Overall, a powerful tale of coming-to-terms and a nice display of Yaa Gyasi's versatile writing style.

Yaa Gyasi writes as if this is her own story, such is the roundness and fullness of the narrative. I had to check whether she actually completed a neuroscience degree. The story draws you in right from the start. The main character is a brilliant young woman researching addictive behaviour in an attempt to discover a clue to her brother’s addiction and demise. The story is told in flashbacks to a youth filled with the absence of working adults and a strong evangelical church. Her family’s background story is wrapped in the the racism and prejudices of the Southern US, but also the hard life of first generation immigrants and the general otherness of the experience of third culture children. What is surprising and wonderful is learning how this young woman rises above all this. The book is superbly written.

so many quotable lines that it was hard to just choose one, but here it is: "...memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It's those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged." The novel moved me in ways I cannot describe. yaa gyasi touches so many complex themes, such as family, religion & science, the immigrant experience, depression, addiction, loss, and identity. some experiences I could personally relate to and others, not so much. it read more like a reflection and discussion of those themes, but I enjoyed the emotional journey.

I absolutely loved "Homegoing" so I looked forward to reading this second novel by Yaa Gyasi. Overall I found it disappointing. The first person narrator has limited self-awareness and is emotionally blocked, so readers feel little sympathy for her- even though she experiences traumatic family drama. I wanted much more insight into Nana, the older brother who OD's- and less Christian experience. Really? Praising Chic-fil-a because of its politics? The description of the narrator's experiences with her lab rats and their addictive behavior was interesting, but not terribly engaging. Writing was stilted at times.

Ok. I have not read Homegoing, yet. I had very little context on what to expect other than a friend LOVED Homegoing. I am not a literary critic but I think a mark of a good book is to draw you in. This drew me in so much I started telling people (even though it says "novel" I was on kindle version so it wasn't staring me in the face every day) I was reading an autobiography. I really believed she was just telling her life story. Guess that means it drew me in! I enjoyed the story. I found it emotional and compelling as well as thoughtfully written. But I was reading form the perspective of this being a true story instead of inspired fiction. Imagine my surprise to read bio on last page

Transcendent Kingdom follows Gifty through her career as a scientist as she unravels her families past and the ghosts hidden behind those doors. This is well-written, making for a quick read, yet still has emotional depth to it. However, at times, I found it hard to relate to the faith and religion brought up.

Yaa is a brilliant writer, and she’s got a loyal fan in me. Her debut book Homegoing is one of my favorite of all time. With this recent novel she skillfully illustrates what it is like loving someone in crisis while navigating one’s own mental health, identity and trauma. I recommend this book, with the caveat that it is not a “light”read. It addresses topics that may trigger your own trauma. I don’t want to post spoilers so I encourage you to do your research before reading.

I've heard Gyasi speak--she's a gifted speaker--and this novel's exploration of addictions and what lies as the root cause as to why some become addicted while others do not is interesting. I prefer her first novel, but this has an interesting exploration.

Recommended by a writer a like to read. A little slow, somewhat repetitive but overall and honest story about complications to our humanness.

Gifty is a gifted scientist trying to get through a PhD thesis and reconcile her difficult childhood to her present. Her dead brother, and her mentally ill and tormented mother comprise the bulk of her attention. This is a beautifully written novel which ends well.

Transcendent Kingdom is a brilliant novel about a young woman recovering from several traumatic life experiences. Gyasi’s writing is powerful, haunting, as she delves into the grief of losing a son, a brother, to the ravaging opoid epidemic. The characters in this novel are fleshed out, and the story is as real as it can be. Gyasi also turns her lens on the intersection of faith and science, and the failures and small wins of Christendom. This novel is an ode to growing up as a Ghanaian immigrant in the very white South of the United States — the loneliness, the racial prejudice, the yearning for home, and the feeling of being caught between cultures. A truly arresting work of fiction.

Very good read couldn't put it down the story was very interesting and the end was poignant. Being a parent help me understand this book better.

I have never finished a book and felt that I need to write a review immediately before, but this novel has created that urge. I feel like I'm going to look over and Gifty, the protagonist of our story, will be sitting on the couch next to me. Every character felt like someone I knew or could know. Gyasi's writing is so beautiful, yet realistic and her descriptions of addiction and the battle against mental illness within a family are so realistic. An amazing story from an intelligent female storyteller!

I was so head over heels about "Homegoing" that I couldn't wait for Ms. Gyasi's next novel. Must say I am amazed at the amount of research she did into the workings of the brain, but, overall, I was a little bored and not nearly as engrossed in this story as I was in her first. Admit I was a tad disappointed. Still, though, I will read her next, because I know the talent's in there.

The protagonist is intensely private, but feels deeply. Told in first person, she lets us inside her search for the cause of her brother's addiction, her mother's remoteness and then grief, her father's absence and her own difficulty to connect with people. This sounds bleak, and it is, but her examination of her life and her family experience takes us along as she examines faith, science, culture and love.

Please write more books you tell wonderful stories in a wonderful way. Thank you for sharing your gift with us

Yaa Gyasi is brilliant. Her writing style is thoughtful and enriching. If you want to feel a story, first read “Homegoing” by her and then read this one. You can thank me later. Sending you good thoughts and vibes.

I can’t explain it but it touched something deep inside me, it wasn’t satisfying-provided no answers. But I’m very grateful for it,

This is an interesting book that combines science and religion, and shows how Gifty struggles with her beliefs. I enjoyed the science aspects of this book. Reading about a woman working in a lab was fascinating for me, but a lot of the novel just kind of felt flat for me. The story at times dragged and I never could truly figure out what exactly the book was about. I guess I kept waiting to see the plot and then some type of resolution, but I never felt that happen. The story was well written and for the most part kept me interested, but I just have no clue what the point or purpose of the book was. 🤷🏻♀️

I loved Homegoing and was so excited to read this. Wanted to love it, but really don’t. Finding it a tedious slog actually, without particularly compelling characters or storyline. Story could’ve been interesting but maybe because of flat characters against a backdrop of trauma and paralyzing depression, I find I’m not engaged with Gifty or her story. I don’t even know what kind of person Gifty is beyond being 1)devastated by the death of her brother, and 2)burnt out by caring for her mother who suffers from near-paralyzing depression. Gifty is trying to combat the incomprehensibleness of the tragedies she’s experienced with an obsessive dedication to the concrete logic of science. Which might be an understandable response in real life. However it makes for an extremely tedious read. Very dull indeed. The negative themes are not counterbalanced with any positive ones so it’s hard to feel drawn in. It’s hard to care what happens next when the shadow of sorrow and bitterness never retreats. It has been cast over the entirety of what I’ve read so far. About 3/4 through and not particularly interested in finishing...

Interesting and thought provoking story about an intelligent woman who is trying to balance her religious upbringing and "beliefs" with her scientific work and studies- while analyzing her relationship with her family.

I was enthralled by the storytelling, loved the intricacy of how she wove everything together. The Bible verses scattered through and the internal battle to understand the protagonist’s spirituality was fascinating. The ending, though, felt abrupt. Like the author just took all the scattered pieces of the story and tied them in a neat little bow and walked away.

After the first chapter of a book, there is a feeling within the reader that, yes, this will be a simple but adequate vehicle for entertainment and/or distraction or that, no, this will be an intimate companion that will capture not only my mind but will also ultimately touch my soul. While I am both scientist and woman and have had tactile experience with divine energy, I applaud the author for this novel that embraces self-awareness, honesty, science, faith and humanity in all its' subtlety. What a literary gift!

Beautifully written story about a girl struggling to balance her beliefs in religion and her studies in neuroscience to ultimately understand her brother’s overdose. It can be a bit slow going at times as the format is kind of like diary entries that bounce back and forth between the last and present. Definitely recommend, but not a page turner by any means.

Transcendent Kingdom🔬🧬 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 This book makes my heart heavy, full, patient, hopeful. There’s so much to say. At the intersection of science and religion, Transcendent Kingdom follows Gifty, a neuroscience grad student, as she grapples with her family’s addiction, grief, and depression through her research at Stanford. This story is a journey that juxtaposes process and order against the mysteries of humanity that supersede the scientific method. It is a triumph. Pairing Recommendations 🎷: Blue Train, John Coltrane ☕️: Medium roast with almond milk

Important to understanding immigration, racism, worship and beliefs that help people cope wirh the trials they face. Also helped me understand addiction and science working to understand it and maybe help thise who struggke with it.

This talented young writer has chosen too write about big themes--faith and religion; loss and unspoken love; immigration, class and race. And.most of all about family and repression.Her approach to these themes goes from straight ahead description to prefiguring to shock and awe containing them together to a sudden and unsatisfying ending.

I was very interested in the author's knowledge of research into reward-giving behaviors. Even though she is not a scientist herself, she got it right! The story seems almost autobiograpical, even though it is a novel.

Totally enjoyed this story but I’m a science geek. The science experiments are a bit familiar and I liked her goals after watching her brother with addiction and Mom depressed. There’s a lot of both in the world these days and mental illness Ian something one sees, so awareness is key!

Gyasi shows her versatility and craft in this engaging first-person narrative that not only tells a consuming story but interweaves a fascinating amount of expository information about issues dealing with race, immigration, fundamentalist religion, academia, behavioral science, and human relationships.

I highly recommend if you are looking for a book to help you understand depression and addiction. It opened my eyes and I enjoyed the twists and turns the story took, even if the events seem tragic. Though the writing style isn't what I normally read, I did like the almost journal like story telling this book took. I hope thus helps. Happy Reading, and Blessed Be. Lily Ashtree

This books hits on so many levels. Mental health and addiction, which affects so many individuals and families, racism, sexism, as ever-present as in real life. Yaa Gyasi writes in a way that this midwestern white girl can get a glimpse into what it could be like for a Ghanaian American family in Alabama and what it is like to grow up between cultures and find out who you are and where everyone fits in. I would recommend this book to everyone.

The author writes as if this is her own story, such is the roundness and fullness of the narrative. The main character is a brilliant young woman researching addictive behaviour in an attempt to discover a clue to her brother’s addiction and demise. Her family’s background story is a sad but unsurprising commentary on the racism and prejudices of the Southern US. What is surprising and wonderful is learning how this young woman rises above all this. The book is superbly written.

"Homegoing" was one of the best books I've read in the past 5 years. I wasn't sure that Yaa Ghasi could win me over with a more modern novel set mostly in the US, but she did! While I learned so much about the slave trade from "Homegoing", I learned about family relationships, addiction, and neuro research in "Transcendent Kingdom". Her first person story about tough love, abandonment, loss, and addiction was beautifully written and thoroughly engaging. GREAT READ!

So good. Yaa Gyassi is one of my very favorite writers. As a person of faith who embraces science, it was so beautiful to read this grappling with the two. My heart broke in pieces a few times as the characters made their journey through the book. There are so many beautiful themes to contemplate here. This would be a terrific book to discuss with good friends. Lovely, redemptive, sad.

I loved Homegoing, but this book was a lot harder to appreciate. There are several prominent threads - a critique of religion, the horrors of addiction, the lasting effect of trauma, the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, it was a little too much in a short book. Additionally, there is little to no redemption, which makes for a dark,long read.

There’s a sweet spot in a book that is again to riding an airplane- the story takes a moment to ascend and then when it reaches a certain altitude, it’s cruising all the way until you arrive at your destination. Yaa reaches this point and, for chapter after chapter, keeps the reader on an engaging ride. Even the landing of the epilogue was so smooth you could barely tell she’d brought us to the gate. What a flight!

HOMEGOING was unique not in its insights particularly but in its structure and wide canvas. History is always with us it seemed to say. Again, not revelatory but the characters relation to each other across many years was engaging and tragic. This book proved that “telling” rather than “showing” is a much poorer way to create drama. The story of addiction is much better told in books that are actually non fiction. Here we are told about the addict and his life. Almost like a magazine feature. Indeed none of the characters resonate — the mother is the Most deeply revealed but even she is most often described. Throughout we are told about the characters and hence they remain flat. The locations are not characters in the book and that is a central weakness. Ghana and Alabama along with CA are places of no matter except for stereotypical descriptions. Sadly a story of loneliness, death, and mental illness was easy to put down and Infoumd myself waiting for the end.

This book started off well enough but inevitably the too frequent place and time changes made it frustrating and unenjoyable. The last section neatly trying to tie everything up without any bridge was cheap. I would not recommend this book. This is sad because the story that I think was being told is worth hearing but from someone else’s pen.

I fully appreciated the title as I moved through the story - all about transcendence. Beautifully paced; it was actually a page turner - not because of suspense, rather because I wanted to “learn/feel” more. I could not stop reading. Very different from Homegoing, and is that not a sign of a gifted writer.

This a profound read! COVID 19 upended our routine and this book told tells a story of family faith, love,loss that many in this world experienced in 2020. Yaa Gyasi is such a gifted writer and her words will stay with you. This book is worth every penny!

I highly recommend! it is insightful to hear Gifty’s inner dialogue as she faces difficult circumstances in her life.. At the same time you see how the childhood experiences impact her into adulthood. Even though it is fiction, it felt like reading a nonfiction And speaks to addiction, depression, and how to navigate the deep questions of life.

I gifted a friend this book for Christmas and she let me know that if you enjoyed the previous book Homegoing, you will enjoy this sequel as well.

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi: This melancholy and introspective 1st person narration explores the connection between heart, soul and mind according to a neurotic neuroscientist. Gifty has carried tons of emotional guilt over the drug overdose of her idolized brother and her mentally ill mother from childhood. While the reader is immersed in her reckoning with race, religion, migration, and death to the point of exhaustion, she continues to ask God to solve her problems to no real conclusion. Emotional realism is good, but this was grueling.

Well written, easy read. Despite the intimacy of the topic for the author, somehow it felt slightly empty. Ending was awfully abrupt.

The author hits on a number of issues, probably a few too many.

This is a fairly good book. It did take me awhile to get into it and even up until the last page, I would have been okay if I had not finished it.

I would definitely recommend this book to those who are able to read books that are somewhat depressing. I can read these books, but I know many who apparently get very down themselves. This book is about very unusual subjects, points of view, and depression. I like the author's style and her observational nature.

A very deep read. Questions of faith and humanity. I enjoyed it because it closely mirrors my experience questioning faith and addiction.

Highly recommended this book. I love Yaa’s writing and her story telling. She writes eloquently and makes the readers feel every emotion she is describing. This story is about an intense love between family members, yet feeling helpless hopeless and lost. Yaa beautifully describes the struggle between them to save one another.

Love this book. Highly recommend

Just telling a story with no sequence. Telling it as it pops up in thread. Good writer

This may be one of the best novels I've read in years. Great characters, and she really nails it with respect to the problems the characters are facing. A pleasure to read, and deserving all the plaudits.

One of my all time favorite books! A beautiful book!

It took a while to get into this book but it examined some good topics. It could have been a little shorter but written well

I struggled through this one. The story lacked momentum for me, and I struggled to connect to NY of the characters, especially Gifty (the main). Anticipation of what's next drove my progress through much of the book, and when certain questions were answered ...the story stalled and dragged. The conclusion did not provide a satisfactory payoff (for me). After "Homegoing", I expected more/different. This didn't connect for me, but I'll continue to read Gyasi's work.

Homegoing was my introduction to Yaa Gyasi. While this was not Homegoing, it was still a beautiful, sad, loving, human story that needed to be told.

The novel manages to convey as much about racial issues and family dynamics as it can without the reader actually experiencing it. The thoughts and concerns around these issues lingers well after the book is read.

Outstanding writing, characters & plot that drew me into the story... This is her 2nd novel and she’s only 30 or 31 yrs old! I’m astonished that a writer this young can write so well & connect with all the readers she has. I’ll read anything she writes from now on!

Don’t understand why anyone would recommend this book I found it boring and I wasn’t interested in the main character in the Least bit. It’s nicely written but the story of a woman who worked in a science laboratory who took care of her mentally ill mother and mourned for her dead brother was dull. Onto another book but not one recommended by Jenna Bush Hager . Janet B.

It was an engaging story. The intersections of religion, addiction, science, depression, and racism kept my interest.

I enjoyed this book so much I bought the audio book (a MUST) and also her first book. She writes like nothing I have ever read in a VERY long time. She is totally brilliant!!! Hope there will be a lot more books from her. Superb!!!

Dear God, Leaving the world of Gifty, Nana, Chin Chin Man, and Mama will be extremely difficult. The struggles of a new life in Alabama and the desire to survive to see the future is the reader's, me, journey. Thank you for Yaa Gyasi's words. She taught me to write to God!

I will read this one again!!! The combination of childhood neglect, power of faith, and devastation of addiction in the family had me wrapped up. The tenderness from daughter to mother was intense. The pain addiction inflicts in the family was palpable.

This book had many resonating themes - 1st generation African immigrant to the US persevering despite challenges including systemic racism; grappling with reverence for God and the importance of science; the impact of addiction and the collateral damage of a child’s illness on the rest of the family; the salvation of excellence. Well done!

This is such a interesting and novel book. Never knew where it was going. Yet it peaked my interest and kept me engaged. It is a moving and humble novel. Great passion and insight was required to write this. Thank you.

Yaa Gyasi addresses the issues of loss and loneliness head on. Using religion and science as pillars, she asks the hard questions in the most beautiful way. This is the second book of Yaa Gyasi's that I have read and I can't wait to read more.

Yaa Gyasi's novel was a joy to read. It was sheer poetry to my soul. And yet, it was also a narrative of the human spirit, facing this life with hope and faith. I enjoyed every word.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The questions regarding the relationship between faith/religion/spirituality and science were ones that many people struggle with, myself included. I also liked the thought provoking characters. Nana helped me to see another side of addiction.

Our book club read this book and discussed it passionately. There was a serious split between those who loved the book and those who found it laborious. By the time we finished our discussion, everyone was a fan of the book.

Young scientist’s quest to understand herself and her family. It turns into her life’s work. Insight into the immigrant experience

Ugh. Massively disappointing book as it jumped from science, to religion, to family and relationships and back again. There was no continuity of a story, no clear thread of any storyline that one could glean. Thr irritating part was that the science, the personal relationships, the background we’re all sport RE rolled into the same chapters, creating a cluster of a story that was just not enjoyable because of its telling. This really could have been better: there is a good story here but not as written.

The humanity and thoughtful in these pages is wonderful. The book covers a lot of territory, but I found myself identifying with Gifty’s thoughts and feelings. Give it a few pages, it starts slow, but it will then grab you and refuse to let go.

If you want to read a novel about a shy scientist who operates on mouse brains, rhapsodizes about her brother who overdosed on drugs, her mother (clinically depressed) who goes to bed for months and life as the only black family in their section of Huntsville, AL, then this book is for you! The author tries to engage on themes of addiction, religion, racism and depression, but it all comes out jumbled and incoherent. Chapters tumble from one time to one topic in mind numbing fashion. I have no idea how the title of the book relates to the story. Skip this over hyped novel.

I recommend this book. Very interesting . The author gives the reader an inside look at the main character & how her experiences growing up shaped her life. Linda G.

I’ve read this book and Homegoing now, and I am a huge fan of the author’s storytelling. She is very talented.

My only criticism of this book is that it felt a little drawn out at times. On the whole, it is a heart wrenching story of addiction, the search for meaning in Iife and the possibility of redemption. It’s given me a lot to ponder.

I enjoyed this novel thoroughly. As a Stanford alumnus, I literally imagined myself sitting with Gifty all over the campus. This book is full of topics to discuss at your next book club. So very well written!

The intersection of religion, mental health, immigration, addiction, Blackness is maneuvered in a way that feels so real. I wanted more, but am content with what I got. I already know I’ll need to reread.

Such a depressing read. I absolutely loved Homegoing but this book left me feeling very sad and wishing I hadnt read it. Maybe that was the point......to leave you questioning and unsatisfied. I just could not get into the main character.

So well-written! I thought it was a memoir (my favorite book type) even though it clearly says, “A novel” on the cover. Very interesting perspective across cultures and with timely issues.

A simple story about a young woman whose family moved from Ghana to Alabama, and her experiences in her family. She writes in an easy flow, and keeps it interesting.

This is one of the best books I have read in some time. The writing is gorgeous and heart wrenching. It really hits home if someone close to you has battled with addiction.

It was a great book I finished it within 3 days. I enjoyed learning about how Gifty overcame events in her life and I’m not Christian but I enjoyed learning about the way she saw God.

This book was my friend for a couple of days. I was sad to finish it. I loved her juxtaposed stories of science and religion.

Moves back and forth in time with ease. The ending worked. The "I" narrator, Gifty, grappling with science and God.

Like her last book, it hit me in the chest with beautiful prose and the love of family. Read it non stop for 3 days.

This book is everything. A stunning account of a young woman's experience in modern day America, including difficult, honest, and fitting accounts of family dynamics, racism, and drug abuse. Cannot recommend enough.

I read Homegoing her first novel. This one is equally interesting , heartwarming and challenging novel. Worth reading.

Quiet and beautiful storytelling. The author perfectly weaves loss, addiction and struggling with faith throughout the narrative. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time.

The character development is terrific. The story holds one’s attention all through. There is just enough tension and intrigue. The writing is wonderful.

This book was amazing - it really brings the immigrant experience to life and show the struggles that people go through for the chance at a better life. I highly recommend the book.

Gifty works with mice to understand addiction. Her religion bears a burden on her life as does a mother who tells her she was a mistake and her brother was everything. Good story.

Great writer the story takes a minute to actually build but the narrator’s overly introspective and seemingly unaware of all of her other characters motivations however it’s worth the wait.

While I absolutely adored her first book, Homegoing, and so looked forward to this book, I just can't get into it. It just doesn't interest me. Maybe if she didn't jump all around, and stuck to one time period for longer it would give the reader more to sink their teeth into? It's hard to get attached to characters... anyway, it's just plain boring. Which is too bad, because the subject matters are important!!!

I really enjoyed this book. It was all over the place but I liked how it read the way Gifty was thinking.

This book just wanders. Doesn't seem to be any real thought behind it. The story is boring, very few if any layers, and the writing just feels...lazy. I would not recommend, but I was able to finish it.

If you want to find your way back to something this book is for you. We are all broken in our own way and this book shows you. An learn to trust the beauty in that.

What a beautiful book -I love her writing -the characters that she has created-the world she takes you into - when I finished it-I started all over again -

A somber, masterful work of fiction about family, loss, science, addiction, and God. I am a big fan of Yaa Gyasi.

Hey reading style is just so intelligent and relatable at every same time. Beautifully written, and an engaging story told from a rare point of view.

Really well written, beautiful clear pose - for our generation, really captures black female voices often in spaces were not welcomed,

If you loved Homegoing by Gyasi I doubt this book will disappoint you. I was instantly hooked once I started.

This is one book I will read multiple times. It has so many layers of what it means to be human.

This book is beautifully written, emotionally and philosophically deep. A joy to read, and a book that will stay with you for a long time.

So much revealed without artifice. If you enjoy getting to know imperfect characters who struggle to fit in, make a new friend.

This is a wonderful book. This one is a Christmas gift. I read with my library book discussion group.

Making me think. And feel. And learn. Incredibly well written. Filled with insights.

Yaa’s first book was so very good that this effort pales in comparison. It’s a good read but the first was an amazing read.

Gripping story, addiction truths and struggles are wrestled with, and there is hope, which is not always the case with addiction

5stars A wonderful read. Heard about it on the today show from Jenna Bush I will share with others. Will share

I enjoyed this book. Not as much as her first novel but still it was a good read all in all.

Bought as a guft

Loved the whole book except the ending. I wish there had been more of a transition to life in Princeton.

Alive. Profound. I will read all of her books. Mice and men share about 97% of DNA. Marvelous. Story moves seamlessly.

Well written, beautifully weaving the themes of faith and immigration. Wonderful story.

A well written novel on a sad topic. It lacked something for me. Took me a while to get through it.

The depth develops slowly throughout the book. Totally unlike her previous centuries long epic. Thoroughly a contemporary tale.

Back page ripped from book cover 😢 Shipping box was fine.

Yaa Gyasi is a brilliant writer. She creates convincing characters engaged in the crises of our time.

I loved the subject matter, the exploration and tension between transcendence in religion and science.

I think purchasing a hardcover fiction book is a treat. I was, therefore, bummed to open my Amazon package only to see the new copy of "Transcendent Kingdom" had a large dirt smudge on the paper jacket. I can't seem to clean it away without ruining the book jacket even more. Had I been in an independent bookstore, I would not have chosen this copy.

This book took my breath away over and over again!

Another great novel by Yaa

Worth the read.

Excellent, sad Good insight into refugees from Africa

I loved her insightful writing style!

Hope you are into many, many religious quotes.

Amazing book. Lyrical prose. I laughed and I cried.

Great story , very thought provoking.

Great follow up to “Homegoing.”

Boring

Excellent book...enjoyable reading

This is am excellent book

This book was a mass of nothing. There was no plot. No lessons learned. It basically was a book about feelings and how to correlate mice to human addiction. I skimmed through most of it and the ending was the worst. There was closure.

I have really enjoyed Yaa Gyasi's book, but I have to say that the construction of this book is the worse that I have ever seen. You can hardly open the book, the binding is so tight. A lot of the pages were seamed together and I had to pull them apart. It makes for reading this book very tiresome, and I hope to never buy another book by this company. Amazon needs to do a better job in in quality control of their suppliers. The book maker was Alfred A. Knopf.

Very interesting read.

Book binding was poor quality. There was a "read with Jenna" stamp on it that I didn't appreciate on my first edition. Homegoing was one of the best books I've read in a while. This one really fell short of the high hopes I had for it.

Great story

Very well written. Gives you a lot to think about. I’m glad it ended as it did, but I would have liked to have had a little more detail.

Book arrived dirty and with product stickers. It looks used.

This just never seemed to end. The content was utterly depressing without any sort of uplifting or satisfying conclusion although I applaud the authors endurance through her miserable ordeal

Book came new but in very poor condition. All the pages were different sizes

I got the book in a terrible state. This one star review is for the state I recieved the book. The leaves looked disgusting and unpleasant. Please see pictures. I have been wanting to purchase this book for a long time. I keep my books in great shape and I am now ashamed to add this to my collection.

Emotionally exhausting and so much repetition. I still haven't finished it but will try because of the price I paid. Such a disappointment.

The physical structure of the book was not good. It has a horrible binding that would not open and was very uneven. It was physically challenging to read the book. I always prefer a hard cover to a soft cover or electronic version. If this is the way hardcovers are going, I will soon be switching to one of the other two. Don't buy the hardcover! Opt for the electronic version instead.

Homegoing was a phenomenal book. Can't say the same about this one.

I'm extremely disgusted with the appearance and printing of this book!! How can you sell someone a book with uneven, jagged pages!! Im very likely to send it back. I was really looking forward to reading this book.

This is a very difficult book to understand and one that I really struggled to finish. The author is all over the place and flips from childhood to adulthood and everything in between. I honestly cannot tell your the primary theme.

the end is a total cheat. all that machination and then magic a good life...

I wasn't very impressed by this book. It just seemed to speak on addiction, mental illness, religion and familial constructs. But not in any way that was intriguing or interesting. Unlike Homegoing, this was a miss.

this book is difficult to read because the printing goes too close to the gutter or center of the book. I have to use muscle power to constantly force the book open enough to read it.

If you want a lite read, this is NOT the book you want to read!

Don't know what about this book makes it a best seller. Depressing and boring. Does not even deserve one star. Wish I could get my money back.

I am only about 50 pages in and I am already finding this book boring. I am hoping it gets more interesting or I might not finish it.

The very title of Yaa Gysai's novel promises an exploration of religious themes. Early in the book, the narrator, Gifty, explains how she first became interested in science and in religion through her fourth grade science teacher. Her biology teacher who was a believing Christian had observed: "I think we're made out of stardust, and God made the stars." Her teacher also said: "The truth is we don't know what we don't know. We don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears." Gifty expands upon her early teacher's difficult sayings throughout her life, particularly when she is a sixth year PhD candidate at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying the brains of mice and the role of their neural circuits in reward-seeking behavior. Gifty is indeed intellectually gifted, having been raised in Huntsville, Alabama by a poor, uneducated mother from Ghana and gone on to graduate from Harvard, earn her PhD from Stanford, and become the head of a prestigious laboratory in Princeton. She thinks often of the mystery of spirit and brain and of the unique ability of humans to transcend various mechanistic limitations: "Though I had done this millions of times, it still awed me to see a brain. To know that if I could only understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn't speak to the full intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. And yet I had to try to understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who make up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I never would fully know." Gifty's reflections on science, religion, and God are at the heart of Gyasi's novel. The book insightfully presents many questions which trouble philosophically-oriented people about the relationship between the brain and the mind, and human intentionality. It also shows the continued influence on Gifty of the Evangelical Christian religion of her childhood, and her attempt to retain what was valuable in it while moving on to her own life. The questions Gifty raises are embedded in her own experiences. Her telling of her story moves back and forth in short chapters from her life in the laboratory in Stanford, to her apartment which she shares with her aged mother, back to her early childhood in Alabama, and to her undergraduate years at Harvard. In some ways, it is a cluttered story. Gifty's focus is on her depressed mother who is largely bedridden and on her brother, Nana, seven years her senior, who was an athlete of promise before becoming an addict and dying of a heroin overdose. Nana's story is told in detail in the book, and his death leaves Gifty shattered. It deprives her of the belief in the Evangelical God and is at least a factor in Gifty's demanding career choice. Gifty shares her experiences on many things, including prejudice against her and her family in Alabama, the difficulties of poor, immigrant life, experiences of sexual discrimination, coming to terms with her own sexuality, and experiences of religious discrimination at Harvard based upon her fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Some of this material weakens the thread of her story. With all of her own particularized experiences, I thought the strength of the book was on its examination of the pervasive character of both spirituality and science and of the efforts of Gifty to understand and come to terms with them and with herself. The book moves slowly at times. Gyasi has done her research and describes in detail the life of a graduate student in the demanding field of neuroscience. With its various subthemes, "Transcendent Kingdom" is eloquent in its discussion of religious themes and will probably be of most interest to those readers with a passion for religious questions. Robin Friedman

It is a rare novel that has me marking sections with tape flags for later reference. Yaa Gyasi weaves together the diverse influences of Gifty’s life - religion, science, family, and asks the big and tantalizing questions around what are we motivated by, what heuristics different people utilize, and feeling into how we navigate the world.

Gifty, the first-person narrator, was born in the U.S. after her parents and older brother, Nana, moved to Huntsville, Alabama. Gifty’s mother battles depression, and her brother becomes addicted to opioids after an ankle injury. His promising future as a basketball star never materializes, as his recidivism drives Gifty to wish for his death, which finally comes after his umpteenth relapse. The introverted Gifty studies neuroscience at Harvard and then does post-doc work at Stanford. For me, her research on reward-restraint behavior in mice is fascinating, especially given that her mission is to find a cure for drug addiction, years after her brother has died of an overdose. Some mice become addicted to Ensure, even after she applies an electric shock randomly when they press the lever to release the Ensure. Ensure would seem to be a relatively harmless addiction, but this book underscores how over-consumption of almost anything is unhealthy if the consequences are sufficiently dangerous. A happy story this is not; it is an addiction story wrapped in an immigration story, with lots of other themes, including guilt, blame, hypocrisy, and loss of faith. The author has a fluid writing style that helps ease the pain, and we read on with the hope that Gifty, who has already overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, will be able to soar in her personal—and scientific—endeavors.

Grifty adored her older, athletically talented brother Nana. The entire town, including their church, celebrated his basketball skills, packing stands in school gyms to watch him play. Nana was the reason for his parents’ happiness, their reason for living. Then in a game, Nana injures his ankle and the emergency room doctor prescribes Oxycontin. Nana never returns to basketball; his star dims. His eventual death from a heroin overdose breaks up their family, paralyzing his mother with massive grief. She rarely leaves her bed, becoming her young daughter’s responsibility. Although Grifty’s mother was passionate and active in her evangelical church, her faith, the Bible, and prayer failed her, motivating Grifty to turn to science instead. Grifty becomes a PhD candidate researching reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. She inserts electrodes into their brains to assess their reactions to electrical shocks. She has them addicted, not to opioids or heroin, but to Ensure. One group of mice immediately stops drinking Ensure after one shock, the second group keeps getting shocked but eventually gives up, and the third group doesn’t stop even when crippled by the shocks. Eventually Grifty gains insights into addiction, science and religion, and learns that one doesn’t exclude the others.

Yaa Gyasi always amazes me. Her prose, her characters, her ideas touch me in a very deep place. I am eager to read more.

"One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly, toward an ever-shifting bottom." With this unprecedented year quickly coming to a close, I've got just a few more weeks to tackle my 2020 reading list and achieve my goal of reading a book a week. I've been not so patiently waiting to read Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom pretty much from the moment I closed the cover on her stunning debut Homegoing. I was left astounded at the way Gyasi brilliantly captured the enormous scope of systemic racism across the timeline of American history while maintaining a relatively small page count. The depth of emotion that she presented in 300 pages was masterful. This new novel clocks in at an even shorter page count but still delivers all of the emotional heft of a much larger work. Gifty is in the 6th year of her doctorate studies at Stanford, working diligently each day to understand the inner workings of neurological processes. Specifically, her science deals with the tragic cycle of addiction and the emotional trauma it leaves in its wake. She watches as the mice navigate her experiment, getting their fix from a chemical concoction that keeps them coming back for more. Gifty sees the agony of the mice who are denied this drug. She sees the depression set in, the will to live diminishes, and the sheer desperation that fills the poor creatures. But these mice are mere pawns in a science project. For Gifty, the realities of addiction and depression hit much closer to home. Gifty and her family moved from Ghana to Huntsville, Alabama when she was just a small child. Her father quickly left the family to start a new one, and her mother sought solace in the only place that was available to her, the evangelical southern church. With one parent out of the picture and the other too worried about protecting the soul of her family to have a real conversation with her children, Gifty and her older brother Nana formed an inseparable bond. The two could turn to each other no matter what. That is, they could until Nana injured himself on the basketball court. The rising star soon became dependent on prescription drugs, and the family was never the same. Transcendent Kingdom sees Yaa Gyasi juxtapose science and religion through a grounded story about a family and their struggle to find their place in the world. There's no narrative gymnastics in this one. Gyasi deftly keeps her story small in scope, remaining intentional in the way she reveals the trauma of her characters. Her main character Gifty is a young woman caught between devotion to caring for her family and a desire to make more of her own life and become her own person. She longs to move on and make her mark on the world but is constantly held back by her past. She is simply unable to tend to one without neglecting the other. Gyasi has written a novel that is classical in its modernity, a story that is both of this time and transcendent of any particular moment in time. This family, these words, all come together to form one truly Transcendent Kingdom.

I loved this book. Sometimes I did find the timeline a bit hard to follow but I was also tired when I read some of this so that could have contributed. A wonderfully told story about depression, addiction, religion/religious trauma, being Black, grief and so much more.

Gifty, the first-person narrator, is a Ph.D. student at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research question, as stated in the novel, is: “Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward-seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough?” (p. 44). She is working with laboratory mice, but she has formulated her research goals to understand her mother’s depression and her brother’s death due to a heroin overdose. Her mother is living in her small California apartment, and the depression has been a huge issue in her mother’s life since Nana, her son died. Gifty tells the story of her parents’ immigration to the United States from Ghana and her brother’s and her own life stories as flashbacks while conveying the present story of her life at Stanford. The writing flows beautifully as Gifty describes Ma’s experiences working as a caretaker and her father’s work as a school custodian. Although Chin-chin Man, Gifty’s father, wanted to leave Ghana, he eventually deserts his family and returns to his homeland to start life anew. Nana had been a gifted athlete, first in soccer and then basketball. The absence of his father and the discrimination he faces in his Alabama neighborhood affect him greatly. He is not seen as a person but as a phenom in sports. After a minor injury, a doctor prescribes Oxycontin and his addiction begins. Once he was hooked, his life changed, and even after reasonable attempts at rehabilitation, he always relapsed and eventually died. One of Gifty’s reactions was a feeling of shame. Her mother became depressed. Since she didn’t believe in mental illness and was distrustful of psychiatrists, her mother suffered in silence. Gifty worried and became determined to understand depression and addiction through her college studies and career goals. The family’s participation in a white southern church in Alabama provides many real-life experiences of blatant racism. Yet, for many years, Gifty believes in the church’s offerings and wants to be saved as a Christian. She doesn’t start questioning her religious upbringing until young adulthood. She always keeps some vestiges of Christianity close to her heart even when she has rejected most of what she had once believed. This heartrending story is beautifully written and ends on an optimistic note after Gifty learns some life lessons, processes the value of relationships, and learns to trust. The title refers to transcendence at many levels. This quote from near the end of the novel sums it up without providing spoilers: “I wish I were trying to figure out how to clone an alien, but my work pursuits are much more modest: neurons and proteins and mammals. I’m no longer interested in other worlds or spiritual planes. I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption. In people, I’ve seen even more.” (p. 264) Kindle Edition.

This is a very well written and intelligent book. I am amazed at the amount of scientific information provided. I only wish there had been more contrast between the characters, so that some would lift the reader out the grey depression that seemed to wrap everything and everyone. I wish Gifty had been a spunky girl, able to see humor and irony in the suffocating world she inhabited but did not try to escape, except through science. This would have allowed the reader to escape as well. I had to push myself to finish the book.

”Though I had never been an addict, addiction and the avoidance of it had been running my life.” Transcendent Kingdom tells the story of Gifty, a young Black woman from Alabama who is working toward a PhD in neuroscience at Stanford University. Gifty’s family emigrated to the USA from Ghana when she was a young child, and her life has been marked by loss and tragedy ever since. Her father left, her brother died of a drug overdose, and her mother suffers from mental illness and has attempted suicide in the past. Gifty’s heartbreaking experiences, coupled with her scientific career, have led her to question her spiritual upbringing and her faith in God. “What’s the point of all this?” is a question that separates humans from other animals... When the answer to this question is, “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”? Yaa Gyasi has served up everything I usually look for in a book - an ambitious, intelligent female lead; thickly-woven cultural context that adds rich, authentic dimension; fascinating questions about the intersection of science and faith; themes that navigate deep issues like mental health, substance abuse, immigration & race in America, scientific ethics, and more. Literally a grab-bag full of everything I have ever wanted in a contemporary novel, gift-wrapped in one of the most stunning covers I’ve ever seen. ”The more I do this work, the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.” The novel builds and burns slowly, propelled more by expository characterization than plot development, which is admittedly challenging for readers who are hungry for conflict, tension, and resolution. There is little of that to be found in Transcendent Kingdom; truly, it reads more like a memoir, with stretches of time folding back in on themselves as the narrator jumps from past to present and back again. ”The memory lingered, the lesson I have never quite been able to shake: that I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.” Gifty, the first-person narrator and main protagonist, is highly intellectual, analytical, and dry. Her life has been marked by profound loss and grief, yet she is hard to connect with, and even unlikeable at times. For the majority of the book, Gifty doesn’t come across as a particularly vulnerable character, despite her tragic circumstances, nor one who seems all that keen on being on the receiving end of empathy - and so, I felt little of it for her. ”If the Kingdom of Heaven allowed someone like him in, how could there also be a place for me?” To her credit, she is nobody’s victim. Gifty is strong, successful, and resilient, all on her own, and she prefers it that way. It wasn’t until the last 20-25% of the book when Gifty finally started to share her real feelings and her truest self with the reader, letting you in on her secretly-held shame and self-loathing that was once masked by self-righteousness. ”I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people, but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle.” I did really appreciate Gyasi’s portrayals of addiction and mental illness. Her illustration of the way these struggles impact those suffering, and their loved ones, is so raw and real and heartbreaking, and redeemed this book entirely for me, regardless of Gifty’s flawed persona. I went into this book expecting a journey toward empathy and compassion, and boy, did Gyasi deliver. ”It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a Pitt, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on when I looked at him and saw just his addiction.”

I could not put this story down. I love her novels. She puts so much of herself into her writing.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi follows the trip one woman makes between poverty and success. A mother hiding food from her kids because she can’t afford them to eat it or putting a switch on the table to threaten not eating every bite of food on the plate are a couple of the anecdotes told plainly and without fuss about poverty and immigrant struggle from the viewpoint of a first generation woman, Gifty, whose parents immigrated from Ghana. Gifty rises to become a PhD candidate in neuroscience doing experiments on the brains of rats in a lab at Stanford to research addictive behavior in humans and whether that can be controlled. The road between these two disparate experiences is long, and complicated by a fraught mother-daughter relationship. The novel reflects on themes of drug addiction, racism, mental illness and the existence of God. The shame, embarrassment and heartbreak of dealing with a family member struggling with addiction is portrayed honestly. When Gifty goes to peel her brother off the park floor, she says, “No one lifted a finger. They just watched us with some curiosity. We were 3 black people in distress. Nothing to see.” Being the lone black woman in a prestigious research university in a male dominated field gives Gifty many opportunities to talk about issues of race - “When I was a child no one ever said the words institutionalized racism. We hardly even said the word racism. I don’t think I took a single class in college that talked about the physiological effects of years of personally mediated racism and internalized racism.” Questions of God’s existence and the practices of evangelical churches are explored in a really interesting way. Gifty has tried being both a devout Christian and an intellectual agnostic and her truth lies somewhere in between. She tries to create a deeper relationship with her mom by trying to embrace her religious fervor, but her mother’s superstitious and judgmental nature makes that impossible. The book is bleak and I was frustrated that the protagonist consistently chose isolation and eschewed joy. The jumping around on the time line wasn’t effective for me either. But Gyasi is an excellent writer and her style kept the book afloat and ultimately readable.

Every once in a while I'll read a book that afterwards I'll find difficult to quantify in one sentence. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi is one such book, and I have absolutely no regrets for having immersed myself in her words. As a reader, I am a firm believer in stepping outside of the narratives that I prefer and that I am accustomed to. Transcendent Kingdom proved to be a delight. In a nutshell, this is the story of a woman dealing with the long-term effects of her brother's tragic opiate overdose, and the crippling depression that drives her mother to her bed. Gifty stands between these two extremes, constantly searching for answers, trying to make sense of the world around her. To compound matters, her father's continued absence gnaws – he returned to Ghana and abandoned his family after they moved to the United States – and Gifty inhabits a liminal space. She was born in America but her roots lie in Africa, so in a way she is neither fish nor fowl. She examines her Self and her world minutely, as if she can somehow pick apart the reasons why things are as they are. While she looks towards her religion for comfort, she's nonetheless aware of the innate hypocrisy of the congregation itself. Yet the cognitive dissonance doesn't quite rob her of her faith – just that she seeks the divine on her own terms. This story is not spun in linear terms and writing as Gyasi does is difficult, so I am in awe at her telling that seamlessly blends past and present in a tapestry that constantly shifts focus in and out, between past and present in a way that nevertheless hangs together beautifully. I can well imagine that I am sitting in a room, listening to her musings as she tries to figure things out. Her observations of people are frank yet sympathetic, and we see two sides of Gifty – the daughter and sister, as well as the scientist who hopes for her research to offer the answers that her religion never gave her. Her empathy for her subjects, the mice that she must harm in order to complete her research, lessens the horror of the experiments that she conducts. In the end, Gifty seeks synthesis, for a deeper understanding of the events over which she had no control. About finally being able to reach out and be part of something greater than herself. Transcendent Kingdom offers a textured telling, filled with empathy, bittersweetness, and hope.

I had high expectations coming into this given Gyasi's name. Was sorely disappointed. The prose is good but feels like many writers who are products of an MFA program. Hard to feel invested in the main character or any of the minor ones. Each page was pure tedium. I hope I can try her other book because I gave up about halfway through this one.