Transcendent Kingdom
by Yaa Gyasi
“...We humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.” ― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom
This novel, the author's second, is a thoughtful, yet often emotional narrative of the life of a young black woman, named Gifty, who is of Ghanaian descent. She is a sixth-year PhD student in neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she studies reward-seeking behavior in mice as well as the neural circuits of depression and addiction.
She is dealing with issues involving family, religion, and science as she grows up to become a intelligent scientist. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after becoming addicted to OxyContin due to an ankle injury. From the opening pages of the novel we learn about her mother who has many issues with living and has taken up residence in her bed. While her father has abandoned the family and returned to Ghana. He said to them "I'm going home to visit my brother . . . and then he never came back."
Gifty is determined to find a scientific explanation for the suffering she witnesses all around her. Even as she turns to the hard sciences to solve the mystery of her family's death, she finds herself yearning for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as enticing as it is elusive. At one point in her pursuit of science she thinks, "What's the point?" and it became a refrain for her.
I was impressed with the non-linear timeline of the first person narrative as the transition from the present to the past was never confusing. In spite of the difficulties she faces, Gifty's journey through life becomes one of hope for the future.
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