Reviews

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

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lowlow's review against another edition

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dark emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

michkeenah's review against another edition

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3.0

i thought it started off really well and rather elusively which drew me in very quickly. i enjoyed Gifty’s ongoing conflict with science and religion and i enjoyed how it essentially shaped her worldview and the book in itself

having said that, i did find the book rather underwhelming — particularly towards the end where it started becoming very disjointed. the book starts off with long, continuous prose and suddenly changes into really weird short and snappy chapters with hard-to-keep-up with timelines.

i also thought that Gifty, as the protagonist and narrator of this story, was rather 1-dimensional. beyond science, religion and familial trauma, who was she? maybe that was the point. but i wish there was more character development, i wish nana and her parents (particularly her dad bc he just vanished for ages and then we were re-introduced to him for like 5 seconds) were written with more depth.

claire_s's review against another edition

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hopeful reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

youreabiggirlnow's review against another edition

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reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

cooslooksatletterssometimes's review against another edition

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hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

marinaemoore's review against another edition

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3.0

Yaa Gyasi is a beautiful writer. I very much enjoyed the writing style of this book, and felt like where this book shone was in the almost poetic diary entries that the main character, Gifty, wrote to God.

This book is heavily themed around science vs. religion. Gyasi confronts the reader with some very thoughtful questions around this topic.

All of the above aside, I had a really difficult time getting into this one. I could hardly bring myself to read more than 10 or so pages at a time for the first 130 pages. The remaining 130 ish pages were substantially more engaging for me personally, but I still didn’t leave this book feeling like I knew any of the characters well or felt any sense of connection to them.

I think ultimately, where this book lost me was in the character development, specifically for present-day Gifty. Towards the tail end of the book, Gifty expresses her hopes for her life and about 1/2 of them seemed to be way out of left field based on the insights we gain into Gifty. I also wish we would’ve gotten more context and background into Gifty’s mother at times - I believe it would have been helpful.

yarfaqikhdir's review against another edition

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2.0

This is a wonderful book written about addiction and the problems of a Ghanaian family that live in the US and have experienced discrimination and hate both from the black and non-black communities, and the reasons behind addiction. It's a book that feels like two in one since there is a part of it that is about the life of female scientist and also her memoir that have led her to choose the field that she is doing her experiments on.

There should be a trigger warning for trauma and addiction and familial issues but what I really loved the details that went into this book is the fact that it was written based on one trip to a lab and it also shows the entity one has to suppress as a scientist when experimenting on animals because there's no room for compassion when you are trying for "the greater good". And also, there were some passages that were written in Twi which is spoken by a large population of Ghanaians.