Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu is a poignant and captivating memoir that will resonate deeply with readers who have experienced identity crises, struggled with the complexities of cultural heritage, and sought to reconcile the past with the present, making it a must-read for anyone grappling with themes of self-discovery, belonging, and the power of storytelling.

I really enjoyed this memoir- I think what stood out to me most was the poetic underpinnings of her story. Nadia was able to convey the trauma she went through, but did so in a poetic way. Throughout the book, she made connections to earthquakes, each stressful or traumatic occurrence being identified as an aftershock. I also enjoyed that as a reader we are taken all over the globe. Nadia expertly conveyed each country and city she lived in or visited to such precise detail that the reader could truly envision themselves there along side her.

The grief of absent parents, where they are taken by life or chose not be there and the uncertainty trying to define yourself when you belong anywhere and nowhere, were themes that really spoke to me in this memoir. Inevitable, yet unpredictable, aftershocks are an apt metaphor, and title, for this book.

Admittedly, this book was originally gifted through NetGalley and I didn't finish it. However, I did purchase my own personal copy and wound up loving the intimacy and vulnerability. I think Nadia challenges readers between the pages, encouraging and pushing them to think deeply about the meanings of the prose.
Utterly inspiring and breathtaking wouldn't do this read justice.

A very beautiful story. Relflective and captivating I couldn't put it down. This is a personal work of art with which I could relate and will come back to again.

I was pleasantly surprised and really glad I requested this book. I love reading memoirs and so this deeply reflective book affected me. Thank you netgalley and the publisher for this copy.

Nadia Owusu is doing memoirs right! A beautifully written story that shows her command of poetry as well as prose. It's a reflection on the effects other people's stories/actions have on our own lives ("my mother became the earthquake"). The stories traverse time and continents that kept me attention the whole way through.

Wow! This may be one of my favorite books for the year!! I was captivated by the story and overall enjoyed it from the first to very last page. I can't wait to recommend it to my network!

This memoir appears to be brutally honest. Generational meanness for lack of a better word is displayed. I am not repeating the synopsis or spoiling. I will note that race plays a big role in how mother treats daughter. The race is the skin color i.e. darkness. With respect for our lives being different, I found the parents both biological and step to be selfish and cruel putting themselves above children. I was sickened by the times Nadia was pushed away by her biological and step mother, and how many times she tried. My heart breaks for her, and all others who grow up like this.

Thank you NetGalley, Nadia Owusu, and Simon & Schuster for accepting my request to read and review Aftershocks.

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Thanks to Netgalley and Simon and Schuster for the ebook. When Nadia was young, her father, who was also her hero after her mother left them when Nadia was only two, worked for the United Nations, living for a time in Africa and Europe. Then at thirteen her father dies and she spends the next decade plus trying to find the correct path for her life. She spends time in England with an aunt, time in Rome with her stepmother, younger sister and half brother. But when she finally arrives as a young adult in New York where she mistakes freedom for what is really recklessness and a refusal to deal with the past and falls into a crippling depression. You root for this smart, but lost, woman from the first pages as she so honestly invites you into her world.

This book was in a way hard for me to review. Her life story is stressful, raw, and full of experiences, all which she described beautifully, she is a talented writer..
She is constantly searching for things that she doesn't seem to know how to reach. Her mother left her, her sister and their father when she was young and this abandonment never left her and caused a lot of hurt in her life. The author and her sister, lived with her father traveling the world as he worked for the United Nations, so they called many places around the world home for short periods of time. He remarried, but when the author was 13 he died of cancer and they were left with their stepmother and half brother, but once again his death leaves her with abandonment issues again, as he was her best friend and always there for her.
This memoir is Stressful at times, but also informative and thoughtful, with a bit of hope that keeps her going.
I learned a lot about so many things from her different experiences, in the different countries they lived in, as well as the people she meets and how she interacts with them.
I would like to thank NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for a copy of this book.

Owuso’s memoir gave me all the feels. I absolutely loved reading about her life: the good, the not so good, and everything in between. Growing up all over the world gave her such unique perspective but it also made it hard to have a sense of home and belonging. Seeing the world and her experiences in it through her eyes was incredibly interesting. Thanks to netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really liked this book. I enjoyed how the author broke up different parts of their life and used descriptions to earthquakes and aftershocks to go with them. I enjoyed reading about her life around the world and the stories about her relationship with her brother. Recommend to those who are fans of memoirs and stories about families

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the gifted copy.

I feel guilty confessing that Aftershocks is presently a DNF for me at just short of the 50% mark. I have picked it up and set it back down several times, grappling with what was not working for me and trying to press on. As the weeks have gone by, I have realized it may be a case of right book, wrong time for me.

I do not want a negative star rating to impact the author since I DNF but also feel disingenuous to give a five star review. The middle ground feels the most fair presently.

I liked how Nadia separated sections of her life to represent fault lines, aftershocks, etc, as they build on the impact these events had on her growth into adulthood. She dives rich into the cultural history of her heritage and exposes raw, honest emotion throughout each pages. I cannot speak to the second half of the memoir but in the first, her writing was eloquent and poetic. The subject matter is heavy, as so many memoirs are, but she pulls in the effects on others just as much as herself.

I hope that someday I will want to revisit this book and finish the remainder to see how she navigated the relationships in her life next.

“An earthquake is trauma and vulnerability: the earth’s, mine, yours.”

Consider me bedazzled! My god, what a poetic memoir! This book got under my skin. It did what all great books should do: in gorgeous prose, it made me think, it made me feel, it made my soul sing. I lapped it all up like a thirsty pup. Highlights galore. I just reread some of them and I was blown away again. The author, Nadia Owusu, is so wise, so insightful, so self-reflective, I could read her words all day long. And I’m always impressed when someone can be analytical and lyrical at the same time, like she can. What I like about poetic, perfect language all mixed up with emotions, sounds, and the flow of a great story, is that it makes everything sound passionate, dramatic. And instead of thinking oh, she’s overdoing it, I thought, yes, this is brilliant. She is speaking from deep down, and there is drama in the soul. She’s letting us in; are we ever lucky.

Owusu grew up on a several continents. Her dad was Ghanaian, her mother Armenian. Her mother abandoned her when she was two. Her dad died when she was 13. There’s a stepmother in the picture. She never got over being abandoned, and to over-simplify, it was a big contributor to an identity crisis that eventually drove her mad.

Owusu uses earthquakes as a metaphor for her life. She weaves all things earthquakes into her story, and it completely works. She talks seismology and aftershocks, of course. She did experience (and describe) a couple of real earthquakes, but it’s the earthquakes within her that get the most airtime. Look at these gems:

“A story is a flashlight and a weapon. I write myself into other people’s earthquakes. I borrow pieces of their pain and store them in my body. Sometimes, I call those pieces compassion. Sometimes I call them desecration.”

“My mind ate the earthquake victims’ stories. It chewed them into private truths, digested them into memories.”

Besides all the earthquake talk, there is also a blue chair that keeps reappearing. She sits in the chair and goes mad. Her madness is scary and intense, and she describes it vividly. And I didn’t see the madness coming—the blurbs don’t make a big deal of it, for some reason. I couldn’t stop thinking of how it must have felt to lose touch with reality. Such pain, such fear, such loneliness. Here is one of her comments about her madness:

“A story I could tell is that my mothers drove me mad. But when it comes to madness, there is no such thing as attribution. There is only contribution. My mothers were the sparks that lit the fire, but they cannot be blamed for how it burned.”

Though I obviously loved this book, I really got mad at the author at one point. Well, twice, but the first time was minor: toward the beginning, she went a little overboard describing the history of some countries. It wasn’t poetic; it sounded sort of textbook-y and I feared I was going to be given history lessons all day. Luckily she pulled out of that gear pretty quickly and returned to her poetic self. Forgiven.

The second crime really infuriated me, though, and kept me from giving the book 5 stars. I’m being vague on purpose, but let me just say she talks about a family member and tricks me. I felt so emotionally manipulated, like she was toying with me, and I didn’t think it was okay. Luckily, it didn’t go on for too long. For a bit today, while revisiting her wise and lilty words, I thought of upping the rating, but damn, I just can’t forgive this one. I guess I hold a grudge.

Nevertheless, I recommend this memoir wholeheartedly and hope a lot of people read it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Edelweiss for advance copies.

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu is such an intimate and vulnerable memoir that had me quite engaged from the first page. With a non linear plot, the book follows Nadia's life story and all the places she's had to be/live in.

I love how she talks about mental health. So open, raw and honest. She beautifully explores love and loss, relationships both platonic and romantic in a way that hooked me, made me relate with her experiences.

I quite enjoyed it.

Nadia Owusu grew up all over the world with her father, step-mother, and younger siblings after her mother abandoned her family. When her father passed away at 13, the relationship with her step-mother only worsened resulting in Nadia's relocation to NY at 18 for school and considering herself "orphaned." Nadia struggled with her identity having absorbed so many different cultures, practices, languages, and even styles of speaking.

This is Owusu's coming-of-age journey having grown up in Ghana, Rome, and London, finally settling in New York after re-patriating. The narrative style is lyrical and reminiscent of recovered memories where each chapter is a portion of her life by age and location. However, it is not organized linearly, which is fine because there is a clear disclaimer at the beginning of the book. The underlying connection between each recollection is the metaphor of an earthquake: aftershocks, tectonic plates shifting, and the sense of unease in anticipation of an earthquakes and what follows.

This is a heart-breaking remembrance of Owusu's struggles with identity (half-Ghanaian, half-Armenian, nationally American), observations and experience of poverty, history of each place she has lived, and a re-examination of her father as a person rather than her idealized memory.

this memoir is one of the most impactful ones I've read that has actually changed the way i live. the prose is masterfully artful in describing and weaving her culture and own experiances.

An open and raw memoir of her struggles with depression, Nadia lays it all bare. I truly appreciated her ability to acknowledge her flaws and those of the people around her but in the end the blame was not solely placed on them. Trauma manifests itself in many ways and facing it although necessary,is often very difficult. The reward is in overcoming.

Rootlessness is the key word and all that it implies. Owusu does an amazing job of conveying her lack of security and permanency though her life story. Not only is the writing so beautiful, but her prose brings us to platforms that the average person could not even fathom.
It was fascinating when the author wrote about the desertion of her birth mother and her all-encompassing love for her father. A mother's total rejection of her child is hard to comprehend and Owusu not only lived through it but managed to, eventually, come to terms with it. When her stepmother so callously makes her second-guess her father's character, you wonder if anyone can sustain her beliefs in what parents are suppose to provide.
The story is so hard to read. Yet, through the author's talent, I couldn't stop reading and appreciated her insight into surviving.