A review by spinesinaline
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

challenging emotional medium-paced
  • 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

 
Thanks to the publisher for an e-ARC of this one! There’s been a lot of love for Gyasi this past year but this was my first by her and I went in with limited knowledge of the book. This was a really beautiful and painful story in so many different ways. Gifty, the MC, is a PhD student studying addiction after her brother overdosed when she was younger. Narrated from her point of view, we constantly come to back to issues of addiction as she tries to study whether there are ways to help.

The book also tackles two other big areas of discussion: science vs religion and the experience of immigrants in the States. Gifty’s family had immigrated to the US from Ghana before she was born and their lives and the racism they face, some instances more insidious than others, is nothing like they expected. Gifty was also raised in a religious household, her priest playing a significant role in her family’s life throughout the book, but she struggles to make sense of the science and religion dichotomy, especially as her experience of Christianity has mostly taught her to be ashamed of herself.

I really enjoyed the author’s writing and these big issues that Gifty struggles with. It felt a little harder to get a sense of her character but there’s so much she’s still working through that we really needed the whole book to get a clear view of who she is as she starts to recognize the harms done to her in her childhood and beyond. I was reminded a lot of Sammie’s post on the trauma of being Black for Shattering Stigmas, as Gifty is so entrenched in this church and Christianity from a young age that she does feel the trauma of being Black before coming to terms with her identity as a Black woman.

I did find the ending rather abrupt and it felt so off from the rest of the story. It was too neat and wrapped up based on the previous chapter so I would’ve preferred to have taken the time to get there. There was also details about Gifty’s work that didn’t feel quite right. The author mentions in the acknowledgements that she based the research off of her friend’s so there’s likely some accuracy there but Gifty is in the final year of her PhD and still doing experiments, not having written a single word of her thesis. For the PhD students I’ve known, experiments would’ve been completely wrapped up and that last year would be entirely dedicated to writing so that struck me as odd. That aside, it’s a really wonderful book if you’re in the mood for some heavier topics. 
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