She decides to pour her energies into science. With no one to guide her, she loses hope and her faith dims. Still very young when he died, she prayed fervently and poured her heart out to God in her journal. Gifty adored her brother and watched helplessly as his bright star was dimmed by addiction. “If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.” She grew up in poverty with an absentee father and a harsh, hard-working mother who struggled to show love. The story alternates between the present and to her childhood.

The racism Gifty and her family grew up with in the South has given her even more motivation to succeed: to prove the townspeople wrong. Her mother falls into a debilitating depression that will haunt her for decades.

The addiction costs him his life (the townspeople aren’t surprised – it’s to be expected from “their kind”). Nana, her brilliant brother, a rising basketball star, became addicted to opioids after a sports injury. Gifty’s parents immigrated to Alabama from Ghana before she was born, and Gifty, now in her late 20s, is a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. ”Homo sapiens is the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom.”

Goodreads transcendent kingdom