Faith and science seem to have failed both women.Īll of my years of Christianity, of considering the heart, the soul, and the mind with which the Scriptures tell us to love the Lord, had primed me to believe in the great mystery of our existence, but the closer I tried to get to uncovering it, the further away the objects moved. Her mother lies in bed, hardly moving, speaking or eating for several weeks. While Gifty is a brilliant student, she has no social life to speak of and she is in her mid-twenties. Neither mother nor daughter are managing very well. The narrative jumps back and forth over time, and from Gifty’s attempts to help her mother to her research in the lab. The novel begins, many years later, when she has had another breakdown, and has come to stay in Gifty’s flat as there is no one else to care for her.
Gifty’s mother has a breakdown, after Nana’s death and Gifty spends a summer in Ghana. Nana’s descent into opiate addiction, attempted rehabilitation, heroin dependence and subsequent death is charted through the eyes of his younger and adoring sister. This is a very effective painkiller, but it is also highly addictive. Nana, a gifted soccer player turned to basketball and sustained an injury to his ankle takes him to hospital and he is prescribed Ox圜ontin. The first was Nana, Gifty’s talented brother, and the second was her father who returned to Ghana. But Gifty lost her faith and her mother’s was severely tried by two significant losses in their lives. She is a diligent attendee and as a child Gifty shared her devotion. Gifty’s mother has put all her faith in the church she attended since arriving in the States: The First Assemblies of God. She is a neuroscientist, experimenting on mice, hoping to find whether it is possible to control their responses to pleasure and pain. Gifty has been a brilliant science student and has moved to Stanford, California to work on her doctoral research. The narrator is Gifty, who has been brought up in Huntsville Alabama, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. This later novel is also constructed as a contrast, here to contrast two apparently opposing stances on life.
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