An learn to trust the beauty in that. To better understand. In one of the novel’s most beautiful scenes, Gifty’s mother puts on makeup before going to one of several jobs. Book binding was poor quality. Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2020. I wasn't very impressed by this book. For most of the novel, Gyasi refuses to give Gifty’s mother’s depression a narrative arc, instead showing us the never-ending waiting that relatives of depressives are forced to endure. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. When a book is purchased through one of our reviews, round-ups (etc.) Despite that, it's not difficult to follow. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. You can still see all customer reviews for the product. Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2020, HOMEGOING was unique not in its insights particularly but in its structure and wide canvas. Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. The story of addiction is much better told in books that are actually non fiction. This book proved that “telling” rather than “showing” is a much poorer way to create drama. Some readers of “Transcendent Kingdom” may miss the romantic sweep of that novel and the momentum Gyasi achieved by leaping a generation and a continent every few chapters. Gifty’s relationships with men are similarly sketchy. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2020. Gifty’s mother appears in all her complexity, her face turned to the wall, “courting death, practicing for it, even,” and at the same time as an unbending protector, washing the vomit off her detoxing son in the bathtub, telling him that everything will be all right. We are all broken in our own way and this book shows you. But what she does with the hard stuff is turn her pain into something concrete. While Gifty shares some biography with Marjorie, a character in “Homegoing” — both grow up in Huntsville, Ala., and encounter a “crazy” person on a trip to Ghana — the picture of mental illness in “Transcendent Kingdom” is darker and more nuanced. Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2020. so many quotable lines that it was hard to just choose one, but here it is: Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2020. Her second book, TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM, is an entirely new approach, yet she shines equally as bright, if not brighter, demonstrating her impressive range and profound skill as a storyteller. Gifty has endured more than her fair share. ― Publishers Weekly, starred review Gyasi's second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is a very different book, and, I think, a better one - contemporary, personal, acutely focused on a single family, and intensely felt ― New Yorker The range Gyasi displays in just two books is staggering ― USA Today TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM. Sep 30 REVIEW : Transcendent Kingdom / Yaa Gyasi. Viking, nonfiction, $27. Gifty is trying to combat the incomprehensibleness of the tragedies she’s experienced with an obsessive dedication to the concrete logic of science. Transcendent Kingdom is a stunning exploration of a family and faith, of self and science. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2020. As in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or the Ghanaian-American short-story writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, the African immigrants in this novel exist at a certain remove from American racism, victims but also outsiders, marveling at the peculiar blindnesses of the locals. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months.”, [ Read an excerpt from “Transcendent Kingdom.” ]. Transcendent Kingdom is a fascinating book because it delves into deep questions of life and meaning. Her mother pulls her in front of the mirror and says in Twi: “Look what God made. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. BOOK REVIEW Faith and fury in ‘Transcendent Kingdom’ ... TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM. Onto another book but not one recommended by Jenna Bush Hager . [ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of the month. Content includes books from bestselling, midlist and debut authors. I have to use muscle power to constantly force the book open enough to read it. Don’t understand why anyone would recommend this book I found it boring and I wasn’t interested in the main character in the Least bit. Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2020. What it’s about: ASubtitled “Two … This book is the follow-up novel to Homegoing, Gyasi’s debut novel.And while Homegoing is not required reading for Transcendent Kingdom, I absolutely want to read it after reading this book. It’s hard to care what happens next when the shadow of sorrow and bitterness never retreats. Recommended: Transcendent Kingdom is definitely recommended for fans of Homegoing, for readers who desire to diversify their reading experience, for those who appreciate relevant and thoughtful themes, and for book clubs who crave rich discussion. When Gifty has a romantic relationship with another girl in college, she muses, “We had kissed and a little more, but I couldn’t define it and Anne didn’t care to.” It’s nice that a same-sex relationship doesn’t occasion conflict the way it once did in American fiction — but it’s hard to imagine that the child of evangelical Ghanaian immigrants wouldn’t have at least some internal dialogue on the subject, whether ambivalent or defiant. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, Knopf, 2020, $27.00, 288 pages. If “Homegoing” progressed in more or less linear fashion, in this book narrative time is more relative; like one of those rubber balls attached to a paddle, it rebounds between Gifty’s childhood and her brother’s death by overdose, her elite education and her mother’s suicidal depressions. Unlike Homegoing, this was a miss. They grow across the course of the novel. Gifty, who prefers evidence to anecdote, cites a study of schizophrenics in India, Ghana and California; while the Indian and Ghanaian subjects hear benevolent voices, sometimes those of friends and family members, the Californian schizophrenics are “bombarded by harsh, hate-filled voices, by violence, intrusion.” It’s not, as Gifty’s mother suggests, that mental illness is an invention of the toxic West, but that the way it’s experienced on either side of the ocean is different, depending on the surrounding culture. She doesn’t want to let the trouble that has been heaped upon her family undo her. Even the landing of the epilogue was so smooth you could barely tell she’d brought us to the gate. See the full list. While her father flees the country in humiliation, and her brother and mother take more interior flights, Gifty responds to America’s challenges with success, deciding that “I would always have something to prove and that nothing but blazing brilliance would be enough to prove it.” To her classmates, professors and even her romantic partners, this dazzling performance is sometimes inscrutable; unfortunately for the reader, Gyasi sometimes obscures Gifty from us as well. Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Almost like a magazine feature. Look at what I made.” Finishing her makeup, her mother kisses her reflection, then leaves Gifty alone to kiss her own. Very dull indeed. Transcendent Kingdom is Gyasi’s second novel. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut. There’s an agonizing fulcrum where you imagine what a Black church might have done for Gifty and her family, how the story of their life in America might have been different. There was a "read with Jenna" stamp on it that I didn't appreciate on my first edition. TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression, addiction and grief --- a novel about faith, science, religion and love. That bouncing around also beautifully captures the rhythms of life with a depressive, the way that the shadows of the past persist in the present. By Yaa Gyasi. “I’m pretty, right?” Gifty asks her. Author interviews, book reviews and lively book commentary are found here. Yaa Gyasi’s beautiful novel embraces faith that changes and grows: A review of Transcendent Kingdom Which might be an understandable response in real life. It just seemed to speak on addiction, mental illness, religion and familial constructs. Story could’ve been interesting but maybe because of flat characters against a backdrop of trauma and paralyzing depression, I find I’m not engaged with Gifty or her story. However, this cursory description doesn't do justice to the full contents of the novel any more than the scientific method encompasses the human quest for knowledge, or than the practice of prayer explains the human impulse to seek guidance from a higher power. Gifty arrives as an undergraduate at Harvard, where the combination of New England weather and her grief over her brother leads her to the university’s mental health services, to request a lamp for treating seasonal depression. Intended to demonstrate osmosis, the experiment, Gifty reflects later, suggested the central question about her and her mother: “Are we going to be OK?”. However it makes for an extremely tedious read. About 3/4 through and not particularly interested in finishing... 4,253 global ratings | 230 global reviews, Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2020. ISBN-13: 9780525658184 Summary Yaa Gyasí's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gyasi’s new novel, “ Transcendent Kingdom,” is a book of blazing brilliance. Her first, 2016’s Homegoing , made a giant splash: Gyasi sold it when she was 25 for a reported $1 million advance , … Yaa Gyasi's (pronounced "yah jessie") Transcendent Kingdom is, among other things, a meditation on science and religion. Exquisitely written and emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut. Again, not revelatory but the characters relation to each other across many years was engaging and tragic. Transcendent Kingdom explores an immigrant neuroscientist’s complicated relationship with evangelical Christianity. Set mainly in Huntsville, Alabama, and narrower in scope than the first book, “Transcendent Kingdom” is no less ambitious and timely in the themes it tackles. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Book Club Questions for Transcendent Kingdom Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom is a study of grief and loss and its effects in different forms. The negative themes are not counterbalanced with any positive ones so it’s hard to feel drawn in. Janet B. Laura Jaye Cramer. Her mother refuses to acknowledge its effects on her or her husband, but Gifty knows “she’d seen how America changed around big Black men. For Gifty it’s a “spiritual wound” to worship with people who believe that Nana’s addiction is unsurprising because “their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs” (in fact, a doctor casually prescribed OxyContin for a basketball injury); that Nana had a chance at a bright future only through sports; that if an African village hasn’t received Christian teachings, its residents are damned to hell. What a flight! It has been cast over the entirety of what I’ve read so far. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. What’s more, it’s entirely unlike “Homegoing.” That debut, as many … Even as Gifty absorbs “that little throbbing stone of self-hate that I carried around with me to church, to school” — a brilliant mirror image of the gold-flecked black stone passed down through the generations in “Homegoing” — inside the house some of her mother’s preserving distance sustains her. November 22, 2020 November 22, 2020 by Kristin @ Kristin Kraves Books. “Transcendent Kingdom” trades the blazing brilliance of “Homegoing” for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name. The exception is the one with her lab partner, Han, who comes alive through small details, like the way his ears redden every time he and Gifty talk about anything more emotionally fraught than the behavior of the mice in her experiment. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Transcendent Kingdom Yaa Gyasi, 2020 Knopf Doubleday Publishing 288 pp. ‘After the Last Border’ by Jessica Goudeau. Transcendent Kingdom is a novel by Yaa Gyasi, published in the United States on September 1, 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf (ISBN 9780593215333). Transcendent Kingdom Yaa Gyasi Knopf. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasís phenomenal debut. Knopf, 288 pp., $27.95. A study we all need right now. Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying … In place of the lyricism of her first novel, Gyasi gives us sentences like this one, where the grace comes from rhythm rather than melody: “I loved Alabama in the evenings, when everything got still and lazy and beautiful, when the sky felt full, fat with bugs.” The transcendent kingdom of this Ghanaian, Southern, American novel is finally not a Christian or a scientific one, but the one that two women create by surviving a hostile environment, and maintaining their primal connection to each other. Men, though, are not the point. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Gifty is a brilliant neuroscience grad student trying to isolate and study addiction in the brain, who is tasked with taking care of her depressed mother when she stops getting out of bed. Yaa reaches this point and, for chapter after chapter, keeps the reader on an engaging ride. Gifty, the neuroscience graduate student at Stanford who narrates Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, “Transcendent Kingdom,” compares her relationship with her mother to the first bit of laboratory science she remembers performing. If you want to find your way back to something this book is for you. I loved Homegoing and was so excited to read this. study of schizophrenics in India, Ghana and California, Ghanaian-American short-story writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Indeed none of the characters resonate — the mother is the, Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2020. this book is difficult to read because the printing goes too close to the gutter or center of the book. Top subscription boxes – right to your door, © 1996-2021, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, See all details for Transcendent Kingdom: A novel. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply ruminative, unrelentingly searching, and immensely moving story about a young woman’s quest to find her way back to herself, and to her mother, through a thicket of ghosts crowding both their lives. Gyasi sometimes reminds me of other writers who’ve addressed the immigrant experience in America — Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li in particular — but less because of her themes than her meticulous style, as when Gifty says of her lab partner: “It embarrassed me to know that I would have been embarrassed to talk about Nana’s addiction with Han,” a sentence whose awkwardness is in the service of its emotional precision. Her father eventually abandons his family to return to Ghana; her mother seeks solace in religion, but doesn’t know enough about the American South to choose a Black evangelical church instead of a white one. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi available in Hardcover on Powells.com, also read synopsis and reviews. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. There’s no device to combat the brutal frost of American racism, though, and it touches Gifty and her family everywhere they go. “A matter-of-fact kind of woman, not a cruel woman, exactly, but something quite close to cruel,” Gifty calls her, and yet when Nana refuses to get off the team bus at a soccer game that their mother has missed work and a day’s pay to attend, she doesn’t scold him, but quietly takes the children home and boxes up the expensive gear. Except when Gifty refers to her mother as “the Black Mamba” — in a childhood journal where each entry is addressed to God — she remains unnamed, but she is the book’s focus and heart. Disabling it will result in some disabled or missing features. This story will affect you and change you. This intimate, first-person narrative follows Gifty, a sixth-year neuroscience PhD candidate at Stanford. Homegoing was one of the best books I've read in a while. In Yaa Gyasi’s New Novel, a Young Scientist Tries to Understand Her Family’s Pain. “Transcendent Kingdom” trades the blazing brilliance of “Homegoing” for another type of glory, more granular and difficult to name. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut. Her father went back to Ghana when she was young. Transcendent Kingdom was found in Literary Hub to have made 17 lists of the best books of 2020. Review by Lauren Bufferd September 2020 Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom , takes us deep into the heart of one woman’s struggle to make sense of her life and family. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. “I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman in science, a Black woman in science,” Gifty thinks early in the novel; she is no more interested in the “immigrant cliché” of the academically successful child whose striving parents sweat blood for her success than Gyasi is in a novel that pits the home culture against the outside world to see which one wins out. This one really fell short of the high hopes I had for it. History is always with us it seemed to say. The book is well-written and the characters are interesting. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi completely changed that trend for me! It is fascinating to read about Gifty’s research and how it results from her feelings of grief and confusion with regard to her beloved brother. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief—a novel about faith, science, religion, love. In “Transcendent Kingdom,” Yaa Gyasi builds her characters scientifically, observation by observation, in the same way that her narrator builds her Ph.D. thesis experiment — a study of reward-seeking behavior in mice. $26 BOOKSHOP. “At times, my life now feels so at odds with the religious teachings of my childhood that I wonder what the little girl I once was would think of the woman I’ve become.” (161) 137 quotes from Transcendent Kingdom: ‘The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. we receive an affiliate commission. Instead, Gyasi builds her characters scientifically, observation by observation, in the same way that her narrator builds her Ph.D. thesis experiment — a study of reward-seeking behavior in mice that self-consciously mirrors her brother Nana’s struggle with opioids. Gifty and her middle-school classmates submerged an egg in various solutions, then watched as it was denuded of its shell, swelling and shriveling, changing shape and color. The moment is emblematic of her mother’s fierce love, which requires a corresponding step toward self-love from her daughter. For this reason, a short, information-laden chapter that concludes the novel felt unsatisfying, seeming to tie up the strands of this fascinating woman’s life too quickly. A site dedicated to book lovers providing a forum to discover and share commentary about the books and authors they enjoy. Although Nana’s addiction is reflected in his sister’s scientific work, it’s the rich portrait of their mother — a woman who pitches between stoicism and intense vulnerability — that constitutes the novel’s most rewarding experiment. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut. I don’t even know what kind of person Gifty is beyond being 1)devastated by the death of her brother, and 2)burnt out by caring for her mother who suffers from near-paralyzing depression. Here we are told about the addict and his life. ]. This page works best with JavaScript. It’s nicely written but the story of a woman who worked in a science laboratory who took care of her mentally ill mother and mourned for her dead brother was dull. But not in any way that was intriguing or interesting. by Yaa Gyasi ... the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say.” This work, Gifty insists, has zero to do with her brother’s death. I knew when I pulled out my book darts to mark a passage on the second page that it was a book I was going to love. Gyasi’s style here is especially striking given the time-traveling fireworks of her enormously successful debut, “Homegoing” (2016), an examination of the effects of African, British and American slavery on one Ghanaian family over three centuries. I received Transcendent Kingdom from my September Book of the Month Subscription and started reading it last Wednesday. There’s a sweet spot in a book that is again to riding an airplane- the story takes a moment to ascend and then when it reaches a certain altitude, it’s cruising all the way until you arrive at your destination. A family in isolation is a kind of science experiment. Review- Transcendent Kingdom. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Whereas Homegoing had a linear timeline, Transcendent Kingdom flashes forward and backward in time. Finding it a tedious slog actually, without particularly compelling characters or storyline. Wanted to love it, but really don’t. Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2020.
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