When we meet Gifty, she is in the last year of earning her PhD in neuroscience at Stanford. The daughter of immigrants to the US from Ghana, she has much to reconcile in her past, and cannot afford to ignore, in order to embark on a more satisfying, fulfilling future. Abandoned by their father as a young child, when he returns to Ghana, then losing her brother when he suffers and dies from an Oxycontin addiction, Gifty is left with her mother. Her mother has relied on a store-front evangelical church for emotional support, to try to be strong and support her children in America, but is finally overwhelmed with her son’s loss, and sinks into a major depression. Gifty has long tried to be good, both for her God and her mother, to pose less of a burden on the beleaguered parent. Dealing yet again with a deeply depressed mother, Gifty reaches a point in life when she must stop being what others want and need, and choose for herself.

Gifty’s research involves searching for the neuronal connection that creates addiction, in hopes of finding a root cause that can be modified. Her mother cannot experience happiness in her depressed state, while her brother’s addiction created for him a chemically induced state of bliss, that could not be sustained. By trying to find the scientific root to her family’s psychological struggles, Gifty is trying to make something worthwhile come from her suffering. Likewise, through journals kept from childhood up to the present, she safely and privately tries to work out her relationship with God, in the midst of suffering over which she lacks control, and for which she cannot find meaning.

Gyasi wrestles with big issues through her protagonist and her struggles— daughter of immigrants, a person of color in Alabama, evangelical faith, loss of her beloved sibling to addiction, loss of her parent, and forced to be caretaker to her depressed mother. Gifty shows great strength through all these trials, earning her B.S. from Harvard and Ph.D. from Stanford. Her final challenge is to find a way to self-fulfillment, and hope for a singular, bright future, one that is genuinely her own.

I somehow missed this novel last year—don’t miss it now. Highly recommended.