tbh, despite the beautiful language and topical import, I found this book to be a slog. Could be Covid.

Gifty, a neuroscience PhD student at Stanford, is working with mice to understand addiction. Her research interest has nothing to do with the devastating heroine overdose of the person she loved most, or that's what she seems to tell herself. The emotional distance makes sense because the overdose is not discussed in her family. Not by her depressed mother or by her absent father back in Ghana. Gifty is a loner who doesn't have much of an outlet at all, and won't even go to the supermarket where she has a crush on a cashier.

Somehow, things ease up. Gifty grudgingly lets people in, and one of her mice escapes its addition.