Transient Kingdom (Yaa Gyasi)

(Listened to as an Audiobook)

A child of Ghanaian immigrants struggles with her faith in the light of her brother’s heroin overdose and her mother’s subsequent depression and withdrawal from the world.

Giftý (the protagonist) works as a neuroscientist studying addiction or (as she refers to it) reward seeking behavior, and the novel is narrated from her perspective in the presence with flashbacks to the past including journal entries that she wrote to God at a young age.

The faith vs. science question comes up a lot, primarily through Giftý’s internal narrative combined with somewhat stilted conversations that as time progresses, she increasingly avoids.

I don’t know that the book had anything to tell me that was news to me, but it was skillfully written and enjoyable to listen to. I’m not sure if I would have finished it as a book or not but listening to a novel is a different experience as my attention sometimes waivers in and out of the narrative (although certainly I have encountered audiobooks where this happens less).

I will also say that the narrator was the same as the narrator for Miss Metropolitan (a superior novel that I listened to previously) which has me starting to wonder if this narrator reads the majority of novels by black women authors who don’t read their own work?

Rating: 🫀🧠🧠🫀🐭🐭