Oyinda Loves Books

Title: Transcendent Kingdom 

Author: Yaa Gyasi

Narrator: Bahni Turpin

Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 

Buy Book

👑 

Many thanks to Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House Audio, and Libro FM for gifting me a copy of this audiobook. I have wanted to read this book since I read Yaa Gyasi’s first book, Homegoing back in March. I was beside myself with excitement when I got this audiobook as part of the September ALCs from LibroFM, and I knew I had to read it ASAP! 

👑

Trigger Warning – Substance abuse and overdose.

👑

While this book was very different from Homegoing, the author was still able to weave together a beautiful and powerful tale that dragged me in from the first chapter. I enjoyed it very much, and I loved getting lost in Gifty’s story. Yaa Gyasi told this tale in a non-linear timeline over three decades, from Gifty’s perspective. Gifty, the main character, is very loveable, and it’s hard not to feel all the feelings she felt in this book. As an adult, she takes us through her life through different stages, and over different important events that happened to her at different times. There are so many aspects of this book I loved, and I’ll be discussing them in this review.

👑

THE FAMILY DYNAMICS: One of the biggest parts of Gifty’s story is her family. The breakdown of her family unit during her childhood was fully explored and told in graphic detail by the author, from a time even before Gifty’s birth. Her family came from Ghana to the United States mainly because of her mother, who had a strong yearning for life in America. Her father came years after, but never really seemed to be able to settle into life in Alabama. This led to so many things going awry for their domestic life, and as the pieces began to unravel, Gifty and her mother are only left with each other, even though they’d rather be with Nana, Gifty’s dead brother. I felt so sad and broken by Nana’s story, and the amount of regret that followed his death.

👑

THE SCIENCE: This book is packed full of scientific knowledge, and you can just see that the author did her research and knows what she’s talking about. The experiments with the mice, the drugs, the addiction, and lots of other bits and pieces of science dropped all over the book. This was very eye opening, and I loved it.

👑

GIFTY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH HER MOTHER: Gifty’s relationship with her mother has always been tumultuous, and we see different events over decades that shape their relationship. Her mother always made her feel unwanted and sometimes unloved, and that made her mother a majorly unlikeable character. 

👑

RELIGION: Gifty’s mother is a religious fanatic, and the church is everything to her. Gifty was thrust into Christianity and the church from childhood without ever being given a choice. After a lot of failed prayers leading up to her brother’s death, she gives up on god and slowly pulls away from going to church with her mother, until churchgoing becomes a thing of the past for her. It still, till her adult years, is something that haunts her, as she finds herself grappling with faith sometimes. It’s a stark contrast between who she’s supposed to be as a scientist, and the religious woman her mother had always wanted her to be.

👑

THE ENDING: Yaa Gyasi wrote such a beautiful ending to this book. There was one part about the ending that made me so sad, but there was so much else to love about the end, I couldn’t be sad for long. 

👑

THE NARRATION: Bahni Turpin did a great job of narrating this audiobook. I loved how she added another layer of depth to this already wonderful story, and I enjoyed having her voice in my head. 

👑

It was also very interesting to see how Gifty dealt with the trauma of her brother’s death from an overdose. She stayed away from drinking and all forms of drugs for the longest time, fearing addiction and a similar overdose. Her brother’s death and her need to understand the science behind it could also be credited for her career choice – neurosurgery. I also enjoyed the author’s infusion of Ghana and Ghanaian languages into the story.

👑

This is one of the most powerful books I’ve read this year, and I recommend it to everyone.

Blurb

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER 

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.

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.