Review of Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

*Transcendent Kingdom* by Yaa Gyasi (2020). Published by Knopf.

If you’re new here and stumbled upon this blog through the magical powers of the Internet: welcome! My name is Ashley, and I worked as a film critic, am an author myself, and I just generally love reading, writing, and watching all forms of art.

I started this blog as a form of a digital diary to keep track of what I’m reading, as I was finding I was reading so much I was beginning to forget the basics of what I was consuming.

That said, I’ve been on a mission lately to read more BIPOC authors. A big focus of my blog has been East Asian literature, who are BIPOC, and diaspora authors from East Asia, but I want to expand the kinds of narratives I’ve been consuming as of late. African American authors have written some of my favorite books, and I feel I’ve been neglecting that side of the literary world in the past few months.

So when I was wandering my local library branch in search of something to read, I kind of had this at the back of my head as I was in the fiction aisles. Then I saw Gyasi on the spine of one of the books and thought about Homegoing. I read that novel my third semester of graduate school.

I was taking a class called The Traveler, and it was looking at travel literature through the lens of the Atlantic Slave Trade. We were really honing in one what it meant to be a travel narrative through the prism of colonialism, and Homegoing was the perfect book to examine distance and travel—albeit forced travel.

I liked that book a lot, so that’s why I picked up Transcendent Kingdom on this fateful day. I didn’t read the synopsis, which is rare for me, I just picked it up and read it within a couple of days.

Alright, I’m rambling, so let’s get into the blog post. I don’t want to bore you with the semantics!

A Stanford graduate student houses her depressed mother as she reflects on her childhood trauma of her brother dying.

Our main character in this novel is Gifty, and she’s highly intelligent. She’s a fifth year student in neuroscience at Stanford University’s graduate program, and there’s such a bright future ahead of her. But when she decides it’s time to bring her depressed mother into her home, saving her from herself, she grapples with her life’s story.

The descriptions of her mother in the present day are quite frankly depressing in itself. She’s a woman with no life left in her, with the classic signs of not being happy, and Gifty certainly has to keep checking on her, as there’s a risk she might off herself if she’s not being watched carefully.

This is a stark contrast to the mother she grew up with. A lot of the childhood sequences in this novel reflect on the role of the church in Gifty’s life and her mother, which is where the title of the book even comes from. Gifty also once had a brother: Nana.

Nana was such a talented student, and he was considered a rising star in the soccer world. But one day he got a knee injury, and he was given OxyContin to help with the pain symptoms of his injury. After getting on that drug, Nana was never the same again, and he would eventually die from an overdose.

Because of all of this, Gifty studies depression and addiction. As we weave through the past and present day, it seems like there might not be a clear future for our protagonist. As she goes to the labs and conducts her tests, occasionally going to a party and socializing, then takes care of her mother, she comes to address many questions about generational familial and generational trauma.

This is definitely a book that comes to question the role of religion as well in one’s life. There are a ton of references to the church that Grifty growing up going to, as well as their immediate reaction after her brother’s death. She’s very much grappling with faith throughout the course of the novel, which is interesting to watch unfold as well.

The writing itself is excellent, but because of the faith questions I found myself getting through this book at a slower pace than I would have liked. It’s definitely different tonal shifts than Homegoing, which is a generational tale about two separated half-sisters and their descendants throughout slavery and emancipation, but I found this to be a quite honest book as well throughout.

Overall Thoughts

As you can probably tell from that last paragraph, I wasn’t a huge fan of the book. As I wrote before, it is well-written. Gyasi is such a gifted storyteller and I will probably read anything she puts out in the near future.

My problem with the book might lie more with the fact that I am not the core audience for it. I can appreciate the themes and nuances the book brings up, especially when it comes to Ghanaian diaspora families, but it just didn’t strike the right note with me. The depression aspects should have, but they didn’t.

If you haven’t read it yet and are interested, go ahead and do so. You may find yourself surprised. Try not to rely on a negative bad review or two from influencing whether you completely ditch a book or not. Taste is so subjective!

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