Review: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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“The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.”

Release Date: September 1st, 2020

Genre(s): Adult fiction, literary fiction, contemporary

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 264

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Synopsis

Transcendent Kingdom is a literary fiction novel that follows Gifty, a fifth-year neuroscience candidate at Stanford School of Medicine. Her research primarily involves working with studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and how this connects to depression and addiction. After her brother Nana passed from an OxyContin addiction after an injury, and because of her mother’s resulting depression, Gifty is determined to find an explanation for everything that has happened in her life through her research.

Review

This book is the follow-up novel to Homegoing, Gyasi’s debut novel. And while Homegoing is not required reading for Transcendent Kingdom, I absolutely want to read it after reading this book. Transcendent Kingdom is the exploration of Gifty’s life and how her past has influenced her current motivations and the answers she seeks to find. It includes so many difficult topics regarding depression, addiction, religion, immigration, and racism, but done in such a way that fully encompasses her experiences.

Transcendent Kingdom follows Gifty’s life in the present day as she reflects on her past experiences and how it has influenced. her. She is a part of a Ghanian family who now lives in Alabama, and much of this book discusses the blatant racism her family has experienced growing up in the South. This book also integrates several aspects of Ghanian culture and how Gifty and her brother Nana explored their identities while living in America. 

Something in particular I found interesting about this book was the commentary on religion. Gifty is raised in a religion that takes the readings of the Bible more literally, and as she grows older, she has conflicting feelings about how she should practice her faith while simultaneously working in a STEM field. Eventually, she attends Mass at a Church that interprets the Bible in a more secular way, and she is then introduced to different denominations of her faith. Personally, I had the opposite experience – I was raised in a Church that had very, very loose interpretations of the Bible and then met people that had stricter interpretations, despite being a part of the same denomination. I found these parts of the book especially interesting as the reasons for Gifty’s embrace of her faith, as well as her methods for doing so, changed so much over time as she explored her own identity.

But the biggest subject matter of this book is Gifty’s family, and what has happened over the course of their lives while living in America. Throughout Transcendent Kingdom, we see very detailed snippets of Gifty’s relationship with her mother and brother and how they evolved over time. We also get to see portions of Gifty’s journal at the time, and how she processed different life events as a child. Seeing her feelings in the moment compared to the present provided a comparison of how Gifty has been coping with these events into adulthood, as well as what she’s been doing during this time to process and understand the events that defined her youth and present day/ Gifty’s biggest motivations for her studies are what happened to her mother and brother, and reading about those experiences made this book incredibly moving.

I’ve been waiting for so many months to read Transcendent Kingdom, and I’m so glad that it was finally published and that I finally read it. This short book has so many layers to it, and while some of the subjects of this book were covered in more places than others, I can easily say that books like these are ones that keep me coming back to literary fiction works all the time.