Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Narrator: Bahni Turpin
Published by Random House Audio
Publication Date September 1, 2020
Goodreads
'TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM' is the story of a family from Ghana that struggles to assimilate to small-town life in Alabama.
'TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM' revolves around a young woman named Gifty, now studying to become a neuroscientist, who grapples with faith, salvation, and science after her brother, once the star of his high school basketball team, becomes addicted to opioids.
Review
A fellow Book of the Month member loaned Transcendent Kingdom to me years ago and I am finally just getting around to reading it. As I say with most of my tbr why did I wait so long?
The novel is addicting in more ways than one. Yaa Gyasi effortlessly navigated between the present day and Gifty’s childhood, exploring how her differences in color, nationality, and religion impacted her life as well as the perception of her brother’s overdose.
Transcendent Kingdom starts off slowly, drawing the reader in with a narrative that is similar to Jean Louise Finch reflecting on her childhood. Like Scout, Gifty learns the hard truths of the world through experience at a young age and I found the tone intoxicating to read. Yaa Gyasi’s writing is beautiful and uses every word to her advantage. I also listened to part of Transcendent Kingdom on audio because Bahni Turpin and, as usual, it only enhanced the experience.
The ending came at me quickly, I went from “100 pages left” to the last paragraph in what seemed like ten minutes.
Transcendent Kingdom is a book that makes you think long after the last page has turned. This is in part because there didn’t seem to be a clear linear timeline. The events could have occurred anywhere from the 1970s to the 2020s. However the topics addressed are as relevent as they are today as they where almost 50 years ago. A truly remarkable read.
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Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
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