The authors writing is good. It brings you on a personal life journey and you can feel the words and emotions in your body.

Owusu’s Aftershocks is moving, emotional and raw. She had many losses in her life yet those losses shaped her allow her to write her story in way that is poetic and heart wrenching.

Clever and fascinating. This was a joy to read and also very informative. This author knew what she was doing.

Wow, loved this one! I really like Owusu's style of writing and learning about her childhood that was spent across three continents and multiple countries. At times, I felt like the motifs of her relationships with her parents (especially her two mothers) could get lost, but overall amazing.

An impressive read, Aftershocks takes you on a deeply personal story that will keep you riveted throughout. The strength of Nadia Owusu's narrative voice shines throughout the story as she embraces issues of a multicultural identity, abandonment and self-discovery.

Read if you: Want a riveting and powerful memoir about heritage, family secrets, identity, and culture.

Librarians/booksellers: A definite purchase for readers that enjoy poetic, gripping, and eye-opening memoirs. From her boarding school days in England, to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and her father's eventual death from what was likely AIDS-related cancer, to her life in Rome and New York, Nadia Owusu has created an unforgettable, unique, and remarkable memoir that will stay with you long afer you finish reading it.

Many thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

I sit here as I just finished the last page. However, I am not finished with the book. I need time to process. This memoir was raw and tragic and beautiful. It interwove so much I didn’t know. So much of this story was hard to read, but nonetheless important. Ms Owusu takes the reader on a journey of her life through Rome, Uganda, England. and New York. We see through her eyes as she is developing her identity. So much for the reader to think about and process.

Aftershocks is an incredible debut memoir from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu that measures the ever-expanding vibrations of the experiences and traumas that shaped the fault lines that crisscross a woman’s adulthood.

Beginning with her young experiences being abandoned by her mother and subsequently brought up by her father silently suffering from a brain tumor up until his death in her adolescence, Owusu brings the audience on her journey of self-discovery pitted with the dangers of magnitude that a young woman of color faces from independence, to education, cat calls to assault, healthy relationships to bad choices, and peppers a strong contextual cultural history of her homes in Massachusetts, New York, Rome, London, Uganda, and Tanzania throughout. There are harrowing tales from her family’s experiences in the Armenian Genocide, near-escapes from a restaurant terror attacks and the twin towers on 9/11, and the gripping fears of learning her brother was arrested – a black man in America - for a crime he didn’t commit.

Owusu swirls these experiences and historical ruminations around our heads from a blue chair, pulling each tale like Scheherazade from lessons woven with rich beauty and terrible traumas that seem almost impossible to comprehend from such a short life. Owusu guides us through her process of her mind’s rifts, subsequent repairing, and the destructive aftershocks that reemerge with every new moment requiring introspection.

This book is a gorgeous work of creative nonfiction as much as it is a lesson on colonial history, a remembrance on the horrors of genocide, a commentary on the state and history of race relations in the United States and elsewhere, an indictment of the effects of public health / law / and economic policy on the livelihoods of people of color, a memoir about love and family, a conceptualization of the long-term effects of abandonment and loneliness, a case study on epigenetics, and a firsthand portrait of how difficult mental illness makes navigating modern life in a complex, globalized world.

Owusu’s prose, and seamless dreamlike transitions between countries, topics, and genres purely illustrate her mastery over her craft. This is a tale of truth. This is a journey. This is a heart-wrenching personal history. A perfect debut sure to send shockwaves across the world in January 2020, and keep aftershocks rumbling for quite some time.

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu immerses readers into a cultural and historical journey as we follow the author’s coming-of-age story and what a journey it is! Along the way we learn of the Armenian genocide in the early twentieth century, the Ashanti people and their pre- and post-colonial lives on the gold coast, the Ethiopian Civil War, and of the establishment of Dar es Salaam, “Place of Peace”. We follow Nadia, who speaks several languages and has inhabited several homelands as she tries to develop a sense of identity and find a place of belonging. We see how Nadia’s life is shaped by the shared experiences of her ancestors and how she ultimately draws from those experiences to navigate relationships with the people around her and their cultures.

This memoir is beautifully written and had me captivated from the get-go. I enjoyed following the author’s story equally as much as I enjoyed her retelling of history and her engagement of culture throughout the book. Nadia isn’t afraid of being honest and speaking her truths, even the unpleasant ones, and that is refreshing. Unfortunately earthquake analogy didn’t speak to me personally, but I was only disappointed because it was the titular theme of the book. Nevertheless, this book was stimulating and engaging and overall, for me, a delightful read.

Nadia ends her debut book pouring libations in recognition of her history and childhood, and the people in them who have informed and shaped her present and future. It is a most fitting end to an incredible journey and a beautifully-written story.

Owusu has a such a poignant writing voice. The writing was lyrical and smooth. Owusu's memoir touches on topics of identity - racial and cultural, womanhood, home, personal growth and trauma. All of this is tied into earthquakes and everything that comes with them. Owusu writes, “An earthquake is trauma and vulnerability: the earth’s, mine, yours. An earthquake is the ground breaking and the heart breaking.” You can tell Owusu had a deep connection with her father and this shown throughout the story. Owusu's life was crazy to read about, I can't imagine some of the things she had to go through. The way the book was segmented was unique and I enjoyed it a lot.

A memoir but also a cultural study this book moves us through the aftershocks of the authors life after events that cause trauma or a change in her life. Spanning the globe and marrying cultures she struggles to survive these aftershocks in her life. A beautifully written book with both a common thread and moments that could stand alone. I look forward to using pieces of this book in my classroom.

This book is well written and definitely honest and soul bearing. I won’t hesitate to recommend it to patrons who want a new memoir to read, though it’s not my cup of tea personally. I admire the author’s strength in sharing her struggles, but it just went on too long , and was a little too repetitive for my taste.

This memoir is truly devastating. The levels of trauma Nadia lived through in all areas of her life are unimaginable. I appreciated how she doesn’t absolve herself of blame when discussing her contentious relationships — with her stepmother or with George.

In addition to outlining her trauma and resulting mental illnesses, this memoir really explores the idea of otherness. To be different from those around you. To belong to no one and to have no place to call home. It felt woven throughout even though it wasn’t specified directly.

Reading about her brother being killed by police was absolutely awful. I don’t have the words. He was killed because he was mistaken for a petty thief because they thought he “looked like him.” He was innocent and unarmed. Reading this story — one mirrored time and time again and being reminded of the ripples of pain caused by our flawed “justice” system was hard but important.

Note: in the story about Rob, the man she first had sex with, he is at one point called Ron. I assume it is a typo.

TW: Rape, Gun Violence against Black men.

A review will be posted on my bookstagram soon (linked below)

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for providing me with an ARC. In exchange I offer my unbiased review.
“My memories are about leaving and being left. They are about absence.”

Born to an Armenian mother and a father from Ghana , Nadia is raised in a household of conflicting cultures and beliefs. Her parents divorce & Nadia is raised by her father; a man she respects and idolizes. Her father instills in Nadia the pride of his ancestors but she is raised as a child of the world and therefore feels unsettled. Told in nonlinear order, Nadia retraces pivotal moments in her upbringing that leave her confused, unmoored, longing.
Nadia tackles the heavy topics of colonialism, privilege, pride, mental illness, trauma and self acceptance.
The writing is gorgeous, poetic although at times the content is repetitive.
A powerful new voice for this generation. Relevant and necessary. A memoir that will leave you exploring the world around you.

What an impressive debut for Nadia Owusu! This intricate, heartbreaking, and honest memoir covers an astonishing amount of ground, from racism, colorism, and privilege to international politics, personal relationships, and religion. I look forward to reading her future work, and I will be recommending this book to others once it's released!

Nadia is a well read and well traveled woman with an interesting ethnicity. She spends a great deal dissecting the history of the countries she’s lived in. Trauma affects in many ways. Which eventually brings her to the present - a mental breakdown.

I received this book from Netgalley.

Aftershocks is a lyrical memoir of Owusu's life as a biracial, dual citizen, and trauma surviving uprooted woman. As a child she was abandoned by her mother and raised by her father who relocated them frequently for his work. In Aftershocks. Owusu examines what it means to belong and successfully step past trauma and find a sense of place within yourself and the world. With a nonlinear timeline, the book may be a challenge for some, but it is beautifully written, so give it a chance to let you find your flow within the text.

Advanced readers' copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Aftershocks is a page turning memoir that quickly captivated my attention. The poetic sense of writing illustrates the author’s triumphs, tragedies, and struggles that pulls the reader as if they too are in the room. The author does not lose her sense of focus as she navigates through her adolescence and adulthood years. I enjoyed the metaphoric interplay of aftershocks and foreshocks in relation to earthquakes, to demonstrate her personal journey. Thank you to Simon & Schuster for providing a copy of Aftershocks in exchange for my honest review.

The description is what draws you in and the journey is what sustains you when reading Aftershocks. I enjoyed this book and recommend it to the reader who likes human, harrowing, yet ever so surrealist literature. The memoir follows the life of Nadia Owusu in the aftershocks following her mother's sudden abandonment. Its strength is its unflinching criticism of the challenges of being woman, multicultural, and smart. It is a crisp narrative you won't forget.

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review. This was an absolutely riveting journey across continents and back and forth through time. Owusu has lived in Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kumasi, London, and New York. With astonishing self awareness, Owusu describes both her privilege and its cost -- on herself, her family, and the world at large. “Let me show you my home,” she writes. “It is a border. It is the outer edge of both sides. They drew the lines right through me.”
This is really two books, a fascinating reflection of an international childhood and the brutal “aftershocks” of the cumulative emotional and geographic upheavals that result. Her narrative intersperses memories of youth with those of a harrowing psychic break, darkly foreshadowing cause and effect. She demurs, “I can only talk about the wars in Ethiopia and Uganda from a remove, from a protected place.” Yet she is not protected enough to prevent the world from marking her. At one point, a violent local militia invades her house looking for children to kidnap as soldiers, and a boy she’s played with unthinkingly hides in plain sight on their couch; her family’s wealth and status shield him from being revealed as a potential recruit. But danger does not lurk only in Uganda, Ghana, and Ethiopia. Threats at a playground in Rome and even her boarding school also imperil her physical and emotional well-being.
The combination of a heart-breakingly fractured family and frequent moves between cultures and languages constitute the book’s earthquakes, in response to which Owusu develops what she calls her “seismometer,” which emotionally calibrates “foreshock, mainshock, and aftershock.” As a result of these quakes and faultlines, she explains, “The story is reshuffled. In the sequence, we only know what goes where in retrospect.”
While I understand the reason for the narrative fragmenting, I found this toggling between locations and time periods disorienting and had to reread chapter titles to remember where and when the action was set. This jumbled organization, combined with a tendency to provide exhaustive background, were my only reservations about this protean memoir. Owusu has lived so many places, speaking in different languages and accents, that some context is obviously necessary. Owusu explains the Black Lives Matter movement, colorism in the African American community, post-colonial theory, anti-LGBTQ laws in Uganda, the Armenian genocide, and Bush’s PEPFAR legislation, among other ideas. Obviously she has been so misunderstood in so many ways that perhaps she errs in providing too much background rather than presuming on her readers’ knowledge.
Having lived through two literal tremors and countless figurative quakes, Owusu writes, “An earthquake is trauma and vulnerability: the earth’s, mine, yours. An earthquake is the ground breaking and the heart breaking.” Yet she bravely owns her history and writes, “A story is a flashlight and a weapon.” Reading this memoir is an insightful and inspiriting tour through the seismic moments of the last several decades.