While I have read many books that I liked this year, I haven’t read many that I truly loved and would give a five-star rating to. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi completely changed that trend for me!
I received Transcendent Kingdom from my September Book of the Month Subscription and started reading it last Wednesday. I knew when I pulled out my book darts to mark a passage on the second page that it was a book I was going to love.
This book is incredibly powerful and the writing is mesmerizing. I could have easily devoured this book in a few days, but I wanted to savor every moment of reading it and made it last a whole week.
Summary
In the story, Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience studying the reward-seeking behavior in mice that contributes to addiction and depression. As she does this she is grieving the loss of her brother to a heroin overdose and her depressive, suicidal mother is living in her bed.
Throughout Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty tells her story of growing up in her Ghanaian family in a small town in rural Alabama and the evangelical church there.
Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
What I Loved
She both grabbles with and hungers for her childhood faith and the evangelical church in which she was raised. I am a Christian, but I really appreciated the way Grifty struggled with her faith. She questioned God and the church, but she also honestly desired to know the truth and never completely abandoned the faith of her childhood even as she questioned and struggled with it.
I could relate to so much of the thoughts and struggles that Yaa Gyasi expressed through Gifty’s character. I empathised with those struggles that I could not personally relate to.
This story was told with abundant authenticity, vulnerability and transparency.
Transparent Kingdom is the second book by this author and I immediately added her first book, Homegoing, to my TBR list! I want to read everything Yaa Gyasi writes.
Themes
Transcendent Kingdom addresses many themes such as family, race, mental health, addiction, faith, science and religion.
Quotes I Loved:
I’m not sure I know what crazy looks like, but even today when I hear the word I picture a split screen, the dreadlocked man in Kejetia on one side, my mother lying in bed on the other. I think about how no one at all reacted to that man in the market, not in fear or disgust, nothing, save my aunt, who wanted me to look. He was, it seemed to me, at perfect peace, even as he gesticulated wildly, even as he mumbled.
page 2
But my mother, in her bed, infinitely still, was wild inside.
But the instruction is not simply to love your neighbor. It is to do so in the same way as you love yourself, and herein was the challenge. I didn’t love myself, and even if I had, I couldn’t love my neighbor. I had begun to hate my church, hate my school, my town, my state.
page 177
Rating
Here is an interview Yaa Gyasi did with NPR about Transcendent Kingdom that I think you’ll love listening to.