Book Review: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Publisher: Knopf
Publication Date: September 1, 2020
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after an ankle injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.

Gifty is the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. She’s a neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford where her research centers on addiction and depression. She longs to understand why her brother, who died of a heroin overdose, became addicted to opiates in the first place. Her mother comes to live with her while suffering from severe depression. Gifty can’t get her out of bed. She can’t even make her roll over away from the all and face her.

As Gifty performs her research and cares for her mother, she recalls her childhood in Alabama, where she was raised in an all-white evangelical church. The racism all around her family took its toll. Her father came from Ghana a proud man but was soon demoralized after things like being followed around by security while shopping at Walmart kept happening. He eventually couldn’t take it anymore and went back to Ghana. Gifty’s mom worked for people who called her the n-word on a regular basis. And when Gifty’s brother became addicted to OxyContin, church “friends” remarked it was no surprise because “those people” seem to have a taste for drugs. When Gifty goes away to college, her fellow students are mostly atheists. Gifty become disillusioned with religion but its impact on her life is profound and she thinks about it and God a lot.

There is no sophomore slump for Yaa Gyasi. Transcendent Kingdom is about as different as it could be from her first novel Homegoing. While Homegoing (my review here) spans centuries and generations, Transcendent Kingdom focuses on one woman and her family. And they are both brilliant. Gyasi is truly a gifted writer with an incredible range. I can’t wait to see what she does next.