I had a lot of trouble relating to this book, in particular its religious element. These passages have a stream-of-consciousness style, so it often feels like I'm reading entire entries lifted from a diary without having seeing the red pen of an editor. But she never seems to get anywhere, just going in circles and circles. Gifty spends all this time and effort trying to reconcile the role that religion and science has in her life and her grief. But like all ruminations, we are treated to a lot of thoughts without any insight.

Instead, almost the entire book is pretty much a big pile of pondering about mainly religion and a little bit of science, thinly disguised as a story.

Her brother gets addicted to drugs, but not just any drug, it's Ox圜ontin, and he does so after a sports injury.) The distillation of these characters down to their most stereotypical forms makes the treatment of these difficult subjects never feel more than skin deep. Before that she was at Harvard, and afterwards, she ends up at Princeton. (For example: Gifty goes to med school, but not just any school, it's Stanford. No doubt all the right words are said, but it feels so superficial and convenient.

They are sprinkled haphazardly across the pages, a little bit here, a little bit there. But I'm sorry to say I didn't get that.įor all these worthy topics, the book hardly devotes much effort to them. I wanted an interesting story that can tie these different and complex topics together and offer me insight that I can take with me long after I've finished this book. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.Īccording to the book jacket, Transcendent Kingdom is a 'deeply moving portrait,' a 'profound story about race,' 'depression and addiction.' And that's what I wanted. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief-a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.īut even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on Ox圜ontin. Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi