She finished putting her lipstick on, kissed her reflection in the mirror, and rushed off.

What did you make of Gifty's mother? Why does she go to America? Why doesn't she go back to Ghana? (see p.243) Does she love her children? How does she show that love? ( 'We stared at ourselves in the mirror.until my mother's work alarm went off, the one that told her it was time to leave one job in order to get to the other. A mouse fight had opened mine, but I was trying to close it back up again.') Or did you appreciate how her character unfolded over the course of the book?Ĥ. My mother had only opened hers the day that Nana died and she had locked it again soon thereafter. Did you need to know more upfront to know why this last experiment in grad school was the turning point for her? (See p.246 where she recalls that it was the mouse fight that unlocked her box of tears: 'Like my mother, I had a locked box where I kept all my tears. What do you make of Gifty? Her backstory is layered into the chapters. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.' p.20-21)ģ.

Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. That belief, that transcendence, was held within this organ itself. And yet I had to try to understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who made up the species Homo sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. To know that if I could only understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn't speak to the full intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. ( 'Though I had done this millions of times, it still awed me to see a brain. What does the title mean? Also see question #20. And if you didn't like it, please come and share why! Suggested discussion questions are below.Ģ.

I too was raised evangelical and went on to study neuroscience and have asked many of the same questions Gifty wrestles with in this text, and yet, wow, if I could only be so brilliant to churn out such a book! I hope you get a chance to try it. The complexity of the issues and the multi-layering and playing with time.

Transcendent Kingdom is a book that makes writers jealous.

Book transcendent kingdom