Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was our book club book for this month. I read Homegoing by this same author and thought it was brilliant, so I was eager to check this one out.

Gifty is a doctoral candidate in neuroscience studying how mice behave when given Ensure as an addictive substance. Her brother was a basketball player who was prescribed opioids after an injury, became addicted, and eventually died of an overdose. She has a complicated relationship with her mother and the religion she grew up.

Our book club members were mixed. We generally liked this book, but there was no rousing defense of it. There are things I found fascinating, like the bits of Gifty's journals from when she was a child, but there were things I didn't love, especially how short the chapters were. It made me feel like I was just getting immersed in the story and then it would abruptly switch to another time and another place.  But the writing is spare and beautiful and says so much in few words. 

This is Leo. I was so excited that he wanted to hang out with me. Friendly imp.

I was a little surprised that our conversation didn't actually go much into addiction or the impact of opioids in our community. The most interesting thing that related to the book that we talked about was about mice. One of our members, the veterinarian, is allergic to mice like the main character!  We also talked about how researchers doing this work use mice instead of rats because the life cycle of a mouse is shorter, so they can get things published faster using mice. So, for what it's worth, our discussion DID go in unexpected places.

So, in general, I'd say meh. It's fine. 3.5/5 stars

Someone brought butterbeer from a Harry Potter experience and it was a real highlight for me.

Notable lines:

Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. (page 36)

I found this image so compelling.

It was a sunny, beautiful day. The kind of day I often took for granted living in a place where the beauty of the school, of nature, seemed to come so effortlessly. This was in stark contrast to my time on the East Coast, where beauty was hard won, where every brilliant day had to be savored, the memories of them stored like acorns buried underground by industrious squirrels, just to get you through those punishing winters. (page 81)

There's always a day in July when I look around and say to myself: You need to remember this for February and March. 

I went to the campus bookstore and purchased a New King James Version with the same amount of embarrassment and fear of being caught that one might have when purchasing a pregnancy test. (page 124)

Eh. I don't think anyone should be embarrassed at either purchase!

She thought the problem would just go away, because what did we know about addiction? What, other than the "just say no" campaigns, was there to guide any of us through the jungle of this? (page 153)

Oh, the Reagan administration has so much to answer for.

The ethnography of my journal is painful to read and unhelpful besides, because I can never know the inside of my brother's mind, what it felt like to move through the world in his body, in his final days. My journal entries were me trying to find a way into a place that has no entrances, no exits. (page 178)

So evocative.