To me, this was not a memoir. For me, memoirs dig deep and get personal, and Brown Boy just didn’t do that in my opinion. Even though I’ve just read a whole book about his life, I still feel like I don’t know Omer Aziz.

Of course, in many instances I resonated with Aziz. When it came to the feelings of imposter syndrome, being the only person of color in white spaces, being a child of immigrants who have sacrificed so much for you. But all those expressions felt surface level or Aziz would go straight to intellectualizing what happened. Aziz tended to end chapters with long winded philosophizing.

I almost didn’t read past the prologue. I think it’s very weird that Aziz used the Israeli occupation as a backdrop for his internal conflict, centering himself where it’s not his place to do so. I also think his use of East and West was cringe as hell. (A lot of the book was pretty neoliberal in that way)

The ending was also an issue for me. I don’t want to say it wasn’t satisfying because as this is a memoir, those are Aziz’s actual life events but I didn’t understand it. How did his visit to Pakistan liberate him? Aziz does not try to explain or express why or how in any way. Maybe it’d in the subtext, but if so, it’s extremely subtle.

Overall, I see the vision here, but i think the execution was poor. I think this should’ve been a political, sociological, philosophical, or any other kind of text that drew from Aziz’s personal experiences. Or at least that’s what I got from it. This book was definitely not for me, but it’s probably right for someone else. 3 stars.

I think the greatest compliment I can give to the memoir Brown Boy by Omer Aziz is that I keep telling other people about it, and that it has opened my mind so much so that I am reflecting back on it in my every day life on a daily basis. Omer Aziz is a first generation Canadian born to brown Pakastani immigrant parents. I am a first generation American born to white German immigrant parents. While I listened to my fair share of Nazi comments during my childhood in the 70's and 80s in a suburban Boston town, I could easily blend into the Irish-American majority with my Catholic faith, blonde hair and blue eyes. For Aziz, growing up in a post 9/11 world, regardless of his character, the differences of skin color and religion were always in the forefront of his mind. While, as a woman in my fifties, I am completely aware of racism and Islamaphobia, reading Aziz's memoir gave me the perspective piece I was missing. Aziz is a master story teller, holding back nothing while sharing a success story that, from the outside, sounds fantastic., which it is....but in our world of glossy-outsides and social media, looks can be deceiving. Giving the reader the back-story, the emotions, the introspection and, truly eye-opening, the level of discrimination even at the most educated, most respected levels of our society, it is a memoir everyone should read.

Aziz grew up in Canada as the son of Pakistani immigrants. It wasn't until well into high school that he started taking studying seriously. This book tells his story and how he ended up at Cambridge, Yale Law School, and working for Justin Trudeau. He is candid, especially about depression. His words on race towards the end are especially powerful.

Azis’s memoir follows the familiar arch of the immigrant/minority story in which the protagonist works hard, overcomes racism and poverty, and finds success. His trajectory: Working class Pakistani family in a poor Toronto neighborhood, the shock of finding himself among privileged whites in college, adventures in Oxford and Yale, and then on to the corridors of power.

The book is at its most interesting when Azis goes deeper into particularities: the fear of violence in the masjid, the fear of violence (again) in the ghettos of Paris, the suspicion from both Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem, the tokenism and politics of Yale, and the racism in Trudeau’s administration.

There are some unexplained holes in his story: Are we really to believe his life miraculously changed from shiftless loser to scholarship recipient just from seeing Obama speak on TV? What happened between graduation and becoming a foreign policy advisor to the Canadian prime minister?

Azis writes well, if at times melodramatically, and I kept thinking of him as the anti-Richard Rodriguez (the author of Hunger of Memory) — instead of falling for the myths of meritocracy and assimilation, Azis says he wants to help open the world for other Brown people. Let's hope he does.