Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi — Book Review.
This books talks about addiction and the issues of black immigrant families navigating their way through life in a foreign land.
Nana dies from an overdose. He gets addicted to an Opioid after he hurts himself during a game and his sister and mother had to deal with seeing him drift and slip away from them helplessly.
Their father — the Chin Chin Man left them while they were young and the mother had to work her life out to cater for them.
Gifty, the protagonist, she struggles with finding herself, with keeping her faith in Christ alive and true while watching her life fall apart in real time, with acceptance and then self-hate.
She begins to question things, and then, eventually, herself.
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She ends up being a neuroscientist who studies drug addiction patterns in mice in honor of her brother’s addiction. But she never says this out loud, she calls it the study of “reward seeking and restraint behavior”.
Things eventually take a turn when her mother too gets addicted to Ambien, a sleep drug and tries to kill herself while battling with depression.
This is a very sad book, but the writer, I think the writer is incredible.
I wouldn’t say I have personally experienced the loss of a loved one particularly, and I find myself living in constant fear of it.
I have experienced grief, and extreme sadness and the trauma that came with memories from the past. I understand first hand what it feels like to be fighting the urge to cry and begging the universe for strength to face the day while the whole world moves on oblivious of your pain.
I’ve seen what pain does to you, the person it makes you into and I wonder always, how much more a person can take until it is enough?.
I am grateful for writers like Yaa Gyasi who write hard things. Whose words feel like a reflection of the parts of yourself you’ve kept hidden and away from the world out of shame or fear of judgement.
I am in awe of her dedication, the work she put in to deliver this masterpiece. This is the first book by her i am reading and i can confidently say that I would read anything by her.
