5 stars
OVERALL: We follow Gifty as she is trying to take care of her depressed mother while also performing graduate school neuroscience research, and both her work and her caretaking make her reflect on her childhood, especially her brother's history of drug addiction and her beliefs in God. This is a book with a lot of thinking about heavy topics, including addiction and faith, and I loved the questions posed!
Content warnings: death, overdose, drug abuse, attempted suicide, abandonment, animal experimentation, racism

This book felt so tailor-made for me and my specific interests and life experiences! I was a neuroscience major in college, and have a strong interest in theology too. So many passages in this book resonated with me--I loved reading Gifty's gradual movement from her very religious youth and strong faith to her current non-believer status. Her constant questioning and wondering about how the world works and how God works--this rang so true to my own personal thoughts, it was uncanny. I loved the musings on pain, opioids, addiction, and the neurological research and knowledge on these topics, as well as how Gyasi connected the discussion to one of morality and tied it in with thoughts on society and the main character's church.

If I step back and consider this book from a purely literary standpoint, I could point out a couple flaws or elements I'd have liked to have been better, but as this book pushed all my buttons in just the right way, I don't want to give it less than a 5 star rating.
My book club had great conversation--I wanted the meeting to go even longer than it did! And I definitely will want to re-read this book in the future!


Some favorite quotes:
" I almost never hear neuroscientists speak about the soul. Because of our work, we are often given to thinking about the part of humans that is the vital, inexplicable essence of ourselves, as the workings of our brains—mysterious, elegant, essential. Everything we don’t understand about what makes a person a person can be uncovered once we understand this organ. There is no separation. Our brains are our hearts that feel and our minds that think and our souls that are. But when I was a child I called this essence a soul and I believed in its supremacy over the mind and the heart, its immutability and connection to Christ himself."

"This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning."

"Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn’t me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it’s a lesson that doesn’t, that can’t, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, in her role as my mother, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there’s dissonance...And when she didn’t get up, when she lay there day in and day out, wasting away, I was reminded that I didn’t know her, not wholly and completely. I would never know her."

"What to make of the time before humans? What to make of the five previous extinctions, including the ones that had wiped out woolly mammoths and dinosaurs? What to make of dinosaurs and of the fact that we share a quarter of our DNA with trees? When did God make the stars and how and why? These were questions that I knew I would never find the answers to in Huntsville, but the truth is, they were questions that I would never find answers to anywhere, not answers that would satisfy me."