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mair_mcc's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-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
5.0
Alabama. The writing style of this book was nothing short of moving. The multiple topics, all very difficult, were woven together in a way that made them interesting, gripping, heartbreaking & relatable all at the same time. I cannot wait to get my hands on more of this author's work.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Drug abuse, Drug use, and Addiction
Moderate: Abandonment, Suicide attempt, Racism, and Racial slurs
Minor: Animal death
abioneil's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Child death, Mental illness, Drug abuse, Drug use, and Addiction
Moderate: Death and Racism
Minor: Racial slurs, Forced institutionalization, Suicide attempt, and Abandonment
sarafinley's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Death, Drug abuse, and Mental illness
menomica's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
“There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”
This book broke my heart.
Yaa Gyasi is so amazing at describing trauma without coming off as gratuitous. She manages to capture the multiple aspects of pain and hurt, and even how at certain level you begin to normalize it.
I think this book is very beautiful, especially if you go in not viewing it with the expectation of a narrative structure. A lot of the storlines don’t tie up in neat bows, they simply end, come to their own natural conclusions. And to me, that feels very much like how things happen in real life.
Anyway, I think this book is so amazing. Definitely recommend.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Grief, Suicide attempt, Child death, and Drug abuse
Moderate: Mental illness
Minor: Abandonment, Death of parent, Racism, Racial slurs, Religious bigotry, and Dementia
rebekahg876's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
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
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Racism, Addiction, Death, and Abandonment
ejs2000's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Grief, Bullying, Body shaming, Drug use, Drug abuse, Addiction, Racial slurs, Classism, and Child death
Minor: Abandonment, Suicide attempt, Religious bigotry, and Racism
charliedezeeuw's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Drug abuse, and Domestic abuse
Moderate: Abandonment
sarah_eggleton's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Really hard hitting stuff but a fascinating exploration into living and loving people who have a mental illness. A lot resonated with me, and the parallel of Gifty’s work in the lab was a really clever way to illustrate very intangible feelings
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Mental illness, Death, and Drug abuse
Moderate: Grief and Suicide attempt
Minor: Racial slurs and Abandonment
grboph's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
This was one of the best books I have ever read, and certainly my favorite that I've read so far this year. I was initially intrigued by the neuroscience and religion aspects of it, but then the characters and story completely pulled me in and kept me invested until the very end. It was definitely a very sad story and doesn't have a happy ending per se, but it is still very hopeful (as the main plot revolves around Gifty's desire to fix the issues that afflicted her mother and her brother). As a sort-of nerd, I also loved all of the musings on the brain and a lot of them beautifully captured the reasons behind why I also want to study neuroscience. I am also very fascinated by religion and the impacts it can leave on people, so I loved reading about the way this affected Gifty as well as her family members' experiences with addiction and mental illness. I also liked that much of the story was just Gifty's stream of consciousness - that is not something I typically like, but Gyasi is such a wonderful writer that this aspect added to the depth of the story in this case. Overall, this was a very impactful story that I will remember reading for a very long time. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in neuroscience or religion, or just anyone who is looking for a good emotional, character-driven book to read.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Drug abuse, Suicide attempt, Drug use, Grief, Mental illness, and Addiction
Moderate: Abandonment, Classism, Cursing, Death of parent, Infertility, Racial slurs, Racism, Medical content, Religious bigotry, and Violence
Minor: Pregnancy, Alcohol, and Animal death
The two main plot points driving this book are the main character's older brother becoming addicted to painkillers and then dying of a heroin overdose and the main character's mother becoming depressed and attempting suicide as a result.emi98's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
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.
The writing was precise in what it wanted to capture or highlight in the novel, and I appreciate this trait. There's probably someone out there that hates anything with very little subtext, or flowery language to wax poetics on something that actually is more emotionally impacting if said more straightforward. Characters that are normally condemned for their shortcomings are treated with compassion, even if there are obviously conflicting thoughts regarding events taken through the book. Examples with her mother, who suffers from increasing debilitating mental illness, are shown constantly through the book:
"If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound."
Of Gifty's brother, who passed over from a drug overdose in her youth:
“My memories of him, though few, are mostly pleasant, but memories of people you hardly know are often permitted a kind of pleasantness in their absence. It's those who stay who are judged the harshest, simply by virtue of being around to be judged."
I loved the main character, and found that I resonated with her a lot of the complex feelings she has with her family, her troubles, her faith, and her decision in the purpose of the rest of her life. Perhaps the choices of her attending Ivy league schools and having a brother who was addicted to OxyContin seemed buzzwordy, but more or less served its purpose in the set up in the novel. The MC's conflict of her faith during her struggles reminds of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, in particular the essay 'Down at the Cross', where he questions his upbringing with the church and the impact it had on how he viewed community, race, and God.
A major theme of TK also dealt with the impact of addiction, though more of someone undergoing grief through loved one's addictions. I really appreciate this depiction as someone who has had similar relations. It is so easy to dehumanize addicts, programmed when we're born by harsh and false rhetoric. As well, the conflict between love and lack of understanding is very real and very difficult to navigate; there are nuances in these relationships that are hard to speak to others, and with the MC, she designates her life's purpose in coming to terms with her brother:
“Anytime I talk about my work informally, I inevitably encounter someone who wants to know why addicts become addicts. They use words like “will” and “choice,” and they end by saying, “Don’t you think there’s more to it than the brain?” They are skeptical of the rhetoric of addiction as disease, something akin to high blood pressure or diabetes, and I get that. What they’re really saying is that they may have partied in high school and college but look at them now. Look how strong-willed they are, how many good choices they’ve made. They want reassurances. They want to believe that they have been loved enough and have raised their children well enough that the things that I research will never, ever touch their own lives.
I understand this impulse. I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself. I don’t want to be dismissed the way that Nana was once dismissed. I know that it’s easier to say Their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs, easier to write all addicts off as bad and weak-willed people, than it is to look closely at the nature of their suffering. I do it too, sometimes. I judge. I walk around with my chest puffed out, making sure hat everyone knows about my Harvard and Stanford degrees, as if those things encapsulate me, and when I do so, I give in to the same facile, lazy thinking that characterizes those who think of addicts as horrible people. It’s just that I’m standing on the other side of the moat. What I can say for certain is that there is no case study in the world that could capture the whole animal of my brother, that could show how smart and kind and generous he was, how much he wanted to get better, how much he wanted to live. Forget for a moment what he looked like on paper, and instead see him as he was in all of his glory, in all of his beauty. It’s true that for years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity, what a waste. But the waste was my own, the waste was what I missed out on whenever I looked at him and saw just his addiction."
The ending, and the unresolved nature of the protagonist's relationship between her family members was the main reason I didn't give a higher rating. I do think it could realistically reflect how many complicated situations can just go unresolved for people, and how life goes on (which it does)---but the way this novel was set up indicated a more tied-up resolution, even negative or partially solved, than what was given (I believe the word I'm looking for is anticlimactic). Also, even though I did like how Gifty's journey through grief naturally tied in with her battle between faith and science as well as how being an immigrant with an absent father shaped this journey, it felt like the author struggled to decide which one to focus on more (as there's only so much you can relatively achieve without losing sense of the plot or having everything turn shallow) and structure-wise was at times messy, and that made it a bit difficult to get through the last third or quarter of the book. Nonetheless, the narrative was incredible both in audiobook and written form.
I haven't read Homegoing but putting it down on my TBR, as that seems to be a generally favourite from readers who have gone through both. To understand more on addiction from a non-fiction POV, I suggest reading The Urge (by Carl Fisher) and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (by Gabor Maté), both authors which suffer from addiction themselves, to start in expanding insight and sympathy.
Pain is unavoidable, but how long can suffering last? This is the question we must ask ourselves, and to others, next time we make our cruel and benevolent judgements.
Pain is unavoidable, but how long can suffering last? This is the question we must ask ourselves, and to others, next time we make our cruel and benevolent judgements.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Drug use, Animal cruelty, Addiction, Grief, Death, and Mental illness
Minor: Abandonment