Gifty is the intellectually gifted but emotionally stunted daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who, while wrapping up her PhD at Stanford, is reckoning with the events of her life and who she has and hasn't become as a result. Now in her late twenties, a depressive episode her mother is experiencing prompts her to look back at her splintered family and upbringing and try to understand what that brokenness has created in her and why. She spends time reflecting in a stream-of-consciousness format on what her father's leaving meant for her family, what her mother's hard work and even harder exterior meant for her self-worth and what her faith instilled in Gifty as a religious child and STEM-focused adult, and what her brother's addiction and subsequent fatal overdose meant for the meaningful work she has set out to do as a neuroscientist.

As Gifty grapples with understanding her life, the narrative jumps around from time and place but always focuses on themes of Christianity, science, addiction, race, mental health, and family. This is a story of how we become what we become and how we learn to accept being the person that emerges from the rubble of upheaval in our lives.

Wow, what a character study. Gifty is so fully realized that it's hard to imagine she is still trying to realize so much in this book. And the emotional payoff for the reader in that epilogue is mighty.

Transcendent Kingdom resonated so deeply with me on a personal level. I too lost my mom to opioid addiction, specifically OxyContin, so just the sentiments on addiction alone were enough root me deeper in this reading than I might have been otherwise. But Gifty's drive to understand the reasoning behind the suffering around her is what made my connection to this narrative concrete. For the longest time, I wanted to be a psychiatrist because I wanted to be the one in control of potentially addictive substances. I wanted to understand what happened to my mom and why. I wanted to know all there was to know about the mental, physical, and emotional components of addiction. So I really understand Gifty, and I really love her, because she and I are one in the same. I was also very religious as a child and spent a lot of time contending with God about why he would do this to me, to my mom and to our family. I spent a lot of time trying to reconcile my love for Him with my hate for what He did, until eventually I drifted away from church and religion and found comfort in my own personal brand of spirituality.

The sentiments on race were also very interesting in this book. It is hard not to want to scream at Gifty's mother for not changing churches. What would the family's experience have been if she had joined a black congregation in Alabama instead of a white one? The bits about the congregants assuming things of the only black family in the church, that line of "their kind are predisposed to drug use," were so upsetting but so real. Gyasi did not have to spend a lot of time talking about race for it to have such a huge role in this novel purely because of Gifty's family's church (and, of course, simply because of her blackness). And that scene of Gifty and her mother dragging Nana to get him in the car and home safely while bystanders and onlookers do nothing to help will stick with me forever.

Many reviews have complained that this book tackles many topics without going into deeper territory of any of them, and I think this is a valid complaint. Now, I'm not the author here, but I do believe this was intentional by her. I think for this character, going deep like that is too painful and not her personal style besides. This book isn't seeking to answer all the questions it is asking. Instead it seeks to show how sometimes we must live in the discomfort of not knowing why or how—why or how tragedy befalls us, why or how some people become hopelessly addicted, why or how God exists or doesn't and why or how he/she/they map our lives to become what they become—until we become comfortable enough that we no longer destroy ourselves asking questions to which there may not be a satisfactory answer. It seeks to let its audience know there isn't always clarity at the end of our suffering, and that sometimes we can't see others as clearly as we hope to, no matter how close we feel to them or how hard we try to see them. And I think readers that are seeking answers may find this book disappointing, because it doesn't wrap up neatly with answers for all of the many, many questions Gifty has pondered throughout her life.

Like its main character, this book leaves behind people and moments and relationships and themes without looking back on them, and that can be frustrating for many, but because of this character and who she is and the journey of healing that she is on, I think this is an appropriate parallel. The only character who we really know and understand in this novel is Gifty, because like her, the book holds everyone else at least an arm's length away. It's not a book with multiple perspectives that are meant to be understood. It is a singular story of one woman who as a child was overlooked, forgotten, and whose emotional traumas went untreated and unaddressed by everyone except herself and by extension God. As a result, she developed a very clunky, patchy self-awareness that she is desperately attempting to iron out in that late-twenties-to-early-thirties period that many psychologists refer to as the most emotionally devastating period of our lives. It is the story of how she grapples with not really ever knowing her family, even the ones that lived inside her childhood home with her, and not really ever truly understanding their own pain. It is the story of a desperation to see and be seen, and one in which one moment motivates the next like the gears in a clock; everything Gifty sees and feels as a child manifests into her motivations as an adult. For Gifty, the healing comes when she finally relinquishes control, when she is finally able to let one or two people into her life beyond her arm's length. We fast-forward through the healing and only come to see Gifty wholly in the epilogue that says so much about that lost period of time in so few words that it can only have been written by a master of the craft. Yaa Gyasi is a true literary gift to us. I will always be looking forward to what she gives us next.