Now as a 26 year old, she has begun to veer away from her religion, studying the science of addiction and mental health to help cope with the trauma she endured.

But Gifty’s relationship with her faith was later strained due to the racist, sexist, and ableist aspects of her church-especially as these played out through her mother’s mental health crisis and her brother’s struggle with a drug addiction. Gifty grew up writing daily to God in her journal and being a true believer. Through both the past and the present, the impact that her church, the First Assemblies of God, had on her family is noticeable. She was raised in Alabama by Ghanaian-American immigrants and the reader catches glimpses of Gifty’s childhood intertwined with her current life at Stanford. Transcendent Kingdom follows Gifty, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford. I visited Yale with Marina Keegan in The Opposite of Loneliness, time traveled to the 1980s AIDS epidemic in Chicago in The Great Believers, and took a whirlwind trip to Ghana, Alabama, and California with my good friend Gifty, a character in Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi. I read memoirs, historical fiction, romance novels, and opinion-editorials. I wanted a way to escape my childhood bedroom that I had spent way too much time in during 2020.

Despite my stagnant state, I desperately wanted a change of scenery. The medication and the pandemic confined me to the comfort of my bed. I had recently started a new dosage of antidepressants and my body was spent. I was tired of quarantine, tired of school, and tired of political debates.

Transcendent kingdom by yaa gyasi