Transcendent Kingdom

Searching out the causes of addiction, the hero of this book experiments on the brains of living rodents. She has been a good girl her entire life, living in Alabama as a Ghanaian immigrant and suffering the slings and arrows of the population’s ignorance and racism. After her father returns to Ghana, her mother continues her job as a caregiver to an old and cranky bigot. The mother wanted a better life in the United States and she ends up in Alabama, ultimately losing her husband and family under the pressures of that culture. The mother increasingly turns to religion even though it is a half measure to her former spiritual self in Ghana. Her daughter, the aptly named, Gifty seeks out a measure of understanding about what can go wrong in human beings. She has but a shadow existence, living only to achieve solutions to complex scientific problems. She spends her time in her laboratory. She takes her mother into her home and cares for her without being acknowledged for her sacrifices and achievements. To be fully seen is her aspiration like so many in today’s world in the Black Lives Matter movement. We long for her to step out of the shadows.