Reviews with content warning for Animal cruelty - Transcendent Kingdom

This book does an amazing job navigating the relationships that Gifty, the main character, has with her religion and her family.
The way mental illness and the death of a relative are explored is so deep and true that it hurts either because it brings back memories or because simply you can feel the pain Gifty has to endure

It's so depressing and real that i would advise to check carefully the tws.

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onceandfuturereads's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective slow-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

3.0

I have to say, I preferred “Homegoing.” This book reads more like an essay collection about the science of addiction and mental illness than a novel. Which, if that is what you want to read, pick this up! I appreciated the tidbits about those two issues, which I hold very close to my heart. However, the narrative was bland. Everything was spelled out. Maybe this is due to the fact that Gifty has such a logical way of thinking, and she is the narrator. And I liked that aspect of her character, the writing style just wasn’t for me.

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emi98's review against another edition

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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.

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traceymc's review against another edition

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2.75

I wasn't prepared for the graphic animal testing scenes, of which there were several, within the first 30 pages. There was nothing in the blurb to imply that such content would be present. It's a huge no thanks from me.

I decided to be a bit more fair and saved this book from the donation pile, mostly because I loved Homegoing so much. Objectively, this book is a good book. The writing is wonderful, as you would expect. But, there was far too much discussion about religion for my taste and I still stand by my above opinion on the animal testing. I'm not mad I decided to give it another try, but I am still disappointed as this was a highly anticipated read for me; and I have no intention of ever rereading it.

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