Transcendent Kingdom: A novel

Addiction and how past traumas shape the path of our lives.

The writing was lovely. I just had a hard time connecting to the narrator.

Transcendent Kingdom - Yaa Gyasi 5 stars Used for 23 “Author with XYZ in their name” but also appropriate for 10, 15, 28, 33, 38, 45, 50 It is a rare novel that has me marking sections with tape flags for later reference. Yaa Gyasi weaves together the diverse influences of Gifty’s life - religion, science, family, and asks the big and tantalizing questions around what are we motivated by, what heuristics different people utilize, and feeling into how we navigate the world.

I love Yaa Gyasi's writing and this book was very interesting. Very different from her first book. But, it's worth the read.

CRANKY'S BOOK CLUB REVIEW This book really divided us! Those of us who loved it - around half of the reading group – really admired the writing and structure and found the story and characters to be believable. The rest of us failed to develop any kind of affinity with any of the characters and didn’t engage with the various themes either. We granted the haters a special Cranky’s Book Group award for persevering with a book that they loathed! The book polarised us so much, it’s probably easiest to write a separate review for the two broad opinions. i) For those of us who enjoyed the book….. We really believed in Gifty as a character. Some of us really identified with her, having been through some of the things she went through, and others felt that her stoicism and fear of letting go was a very believable result of the privations and prejudice she experienced throughout her life. Gifty's intellectual struggles with religious faith on a personal level and with her university colleagues were felt to be very believable, particularly for those of us who had studied neuroscience or philosophy, or who had had a deep religious faith at some time in their life. We found the quality of writing to be subtle and brilliant, and the treatment of racial prejudice in Alabama to be powerful and believable. Some of us really loved the character of Nana and were moved by the interplay between him and Gifty as children. ii) For those of us who disliked the book…. We failed to engage with Gifty as a character. Some of us really disliked the cold way that she treated her depressed mother and felt that the novel required a more rounded treatment of The Black Mamba, Gifty’s mother. Many of us remarked that this was not the kind of book that they would choose to read, and that the various themes of religion, cell biology experiments on mice, addiction and racism in the southern states of America were depressing and dry, and that sometimes the discussions felt like polemics or ‘box ticking’ exercises. -- We discussed the Chin Chin Man and his impact on the novel. Some of us wondered whether he needed to be there at all, in that he was barely present, whereas others felt that his lack of depth was because he was being recalled by his daughter who had lost contact with him as a child, and that his departure for Ghana was critical in that it had wounded Gifty, Nana and their mother irreparably, in different ways. Something we all agreed upon was that we found the ending to be a bit glib and stunted. For many of us, it was a relief to read that Gifty had a ‘happy ending’ but we found the neatness and lack of development unsatisfying – but most agreed that it was lovely that Gifty’s lighting of the two candles showed in a poetic way that she had reconciled her spirituality with her belief in the scientific method. We gave the book a rating of 6/10.