After a volatile childhood in south Africa at the height of apartheid, Lisa-Jo Baker attends college in America to try and make sense of the inequalities around her. Her father's anger, her mother's death from cancer, and the politics raging around her helped shape her story. In an emotional and truthful way, Lisa-Jo explores who she was, who her father was, and who they became together. It is a touching story of redemption and Jesus bringing them all together and weaving their story into one to be told.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

an amazing and powerful memoir .. of fathers and daughters … mothers and loss … apartheid and the complicated past and present of South Africa . A beautifully written memoir that often had me in tears …

I have read this author's books before, but this is her first memoir. I also listened to the podcast she co-hosts with Christie Purifoy. It was interesting to learn more about her story and her life in South Africa. This memoir reads like a novel - it held my attention to the end, and I enjoyed reading it immensely. It's a White person's view on Apartheid, but it is filled with remorse, regret and repentance.

The alternating stories from her father's life and her life, seeing the things they have in common, where their life stories overlapped was a wonderful touch. She uses a poetic, almost lyric language and writing style. It took a bit to get into it, but it soon drew me in and I kept reading and reading.

The only thing I didn't like was the sudden change in her father; I feel she could have given a more detailed look into how that important, life-altering transformation took place. She talked so much about her father's anger and mistakes and fails as a father, but I would have liked to learn what prompted the change? was it easy? was it more sudden or it was a longer process? She just mentions it, but pinpointing that exact moment would have been better.

This is a good book, and I think it adds value to the personal stories of South Africans. It sheds light on a part of history not many know much about.

Oh my goodness! This amazing, powerful book about the author’s, Lisa-Jo Baker’s South African life during the apartheid was excellent. The trauma, mindset and events are so raw and poignantly described, was a big eye opener! Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGally for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

This was easily a 5-star read for me. Lisa-Jo Baker is an incredible storyteller.

This memoir taught me much about South Africa, its languages, history, and culture. On top of that, Lisa-Jo's story was weaved in perfectly while analyzing her home country's past and present. Themes of being a daughter, losing a parent, generational trauma, faith, and so much more are discussed so well and so beautifully in It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping.

I believe anyone would benefit from reading this book. Lisa-Jo challenges readers to reflect on their own history and their relationships with grace. She so eloquently discusses the feeling of home and family. I can't recommend it enough!

Thank you to NetGalley and Convergent Books for an advanced copy of this incredible memoir in exchange for my honest review.

Absolutely Beautifully written, thought-provoking memoir.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher Convergent Books

What a book!

In this memoir Lisa-Jo weaves together her life on two continents – her native South African and her adopted United States – with depth, yearning, pain, learning and ultimately love. A central part of her story is the early death of her mother coupled with the way her father parented her. She's unstinting in her descriptions of the pain of that relationship, but she also shares their redemptive journey, which will give hope to any reader who has suffered from painful parental relationships. There is hope of healing.

I loved how she wove in the various native languages into her prose, which shines with truth, beauty, and meaning. This book is a labor of love, with the craftsmanship evident in the writing.

A deserving 5 stars.

A searingly honest memoir about growing up white in South Africa at the height of the apartheid. I appreciate the intelligence and compassion of the author and her willingness to look at her own circumstances and privilege with a critical eye. Heartbreaking for so many reasons, but also essential reading. #ConvergentBooks

I've always loved Lisa-Jo's writing. Surprised By Motherhood was a balm to my soul as a new mom, and I've resonated deeply with many of her Instagram captions as she's reflected on raising kiddos, an evolving faith, and getting older. So I was so excited for another memoir from her. This was stunning. Baker is lyrical and brutally honest. Her words are hopeful and propulsive. Parts were extremely hard to read but the beauty of a redemptive God was always there.

It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping by Lisa-Jo Baker is one of the best books I have ever read. It is a phenomenal, raw memoir that takes you through the author's personal history as well as through the history of South Africa. This book will have you examining your own life and learning from the author's experience of God and His healing power to redeem our histories and set us free. It is a powerful book. I have already personally recommended it to a few people and I hope they read it because it is such a life-changing book. I highly recommend it. I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher with no obligations. These opinions are entirely my own. I also purchased the audiobook read by the author and I highly recommend this version for many reasons-- you won't regret this purchase in any format.

4.5~4★
“This story is not a movie. It is not fiction. And in places it may be as painful for you to read as it was for me and others to live. I like to watch movie trailers because I want to be prepared for the story I’m about to step into. This one includes emotional, verbal, physical, and racial violence. I want you to be prepared, and I’m grateful if you choose to keep reading. Because that isn’t the end of the story. There is hope ahead.”

Most authors don’t give you trigger warnings, but Lisa-Jo Baker isn’t like most authors. In her memoir, (if I can call it that), she describes her sometimes violent childhood in South Africa and discovering her own surprising capacity for violence in her second homeland of America.

“I watched myself terrorize my son. I watched his spirit cower behind his eyes, behind the tears he was too embarrassed to let fall, watching me and waiting for it to be over. Trying to become as small and still as possible so as not to step on another landmine. I watched and I recognized the signs of my own terrified childhood. And still I kept screaming. I chose to keep screaming. And as I hovered outside myself, watching the lava pour out of my mouth, one single thought shot ice-cold through my inferno: I am my father. “

She seems to have had a fractured relationship with her father, a man who was sometimes the kindly doctor and sometimes an enraged, screaming man whose ‘monster’ was unleashed on his daughter when she upset him. To discover she had inherited that monster was a shock.

I think that’s what she means on a personal level about not repeating the stories of our fathers. As a boy, her father was witness to the violence of white South Africans against black farm workers, who lived not unlike slaves, or at least indentured workers, on the farms of white landowners.

When I first began reading, I was annoyed at how self-centred she seemed. I could see why her father lost his temper (although he badly overreacted). As she moved into the history of both her family and her country of South Africa, I understood more about how she had tried to tear herself away from all that was wrong but hold onto all that was good and loving.

I think she also means that our countries aren’t bound to repeat the mistakes of their founding fathers. Nations and individuals can learn to do better.

In her case, her mother died when she was a teen, and her father went round the bend, I would say, remarrying suddenly and angry that she wasn’t happy for him. She’d barely got over the shock of losing her mother, to whom she was closest.

Father and daughter really are like two sides of the same coin, and over the years we see how inextricably they are linked and loyal to each other, and also how they have continued to exasperate each other.

Her stories and anecdotes sometimes stop rather abruptly, and I’d find myself in another part of her life, leaving me wondering what happened to that person or relationship. But this is not a linear novel nor a time-jumping historical fiction. These are memories from her life, and she moves back and forth, often foreshadowing something that will happen years later, when she is a mother herself.

She speaks of the many languages spoken in her country and the different cultures. Not only were the original tribes different from each other, so were the whites who arrived later.

“The dinosaur of White supremacy had been trekking across the subcontinent since the first dissatisfied Dutch-speaking colonists broke with their Cape community and church in the 1830s in search of a promised land where they would be free from British rule and could establish their own independent land and doctrine.”

She uses her personal memories to introduce some of the history of South Africa, including the restricted rights of the many indigenous tribes.

“And by 1970, when my dad was chugging the eighteen-hour drive between medical school and Manguzi, the government was passing the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act. Millions of indigenous people (Bantus) would be herded into designated Black-only areas (homelands), also known as Bantustans. Think Jim Crow meets Indian reservations for each of South Africa’s indigenous people groups.”

Born in the Bantustan of KwaZulu, the Land of the Zulus, she grew up simply accepting her place as a ‘native’ South African, waving to the little black kids at the side of the road when her family drove to the farm for their holidays, which she loved.

“I know nothing about the children waving to me other than that to wave back brings me joy. So I assume that a shared joyful existence is mutual. I don’t know that they are from the Xhosa tribe. I don’t know that they’ve picked up Afrikaans as part of their parents’ migration from the Ciskei, the “homeland” area where our government has forcibly relocated their people, this side of the mighty Kei River. I don’t know that this adopted language is evidence of their family’s search for work from Afrikaans-speaking farmers.
. . .
I don’t question my name and I don’t question how our staff live. I just know it is not how we live. Their homes are a background detail in the painting of my favorite holiday scene. Interesting local texture, a curiosity, these people who I don’t think about enough to wonder why a whole family would ever choose to live in a one-room dwelling with no indoor plumbing, the size of my farmhouse bedroom.”

Other than being occasionally annoyed by her troublesome nature (I think she’d be hard to live with, and so would her father), I enjoyed her story and learning more about South Africa. Her writing is descriptive, heartfelt, and easy to read.

She has notes at the end of the book with references to some of the history and facts, including that the title comes from the Epigraph which comes from a song.

“ ‘Weeping’ was written by Dan Heymann, Ian Cohen, Peter Cohen, and Tom Fox of the band Bright Blue in the 1980s as an anti-apartheid song.”

Thanks to #NetGalley and Convergent Books for a copy of #ItWasntRoaringItWasWeeping for review.

This is Lisa Jo Baker’s memoir of coming of age on a sheep ranch in South Africa. She lost her mother to cancer as an adolescent and the following year the medical bills took their ranch. Her father, a medical doctor, didn’t handle his loss well and Lisa Jo said it was like growing up the child of an alcoholic, only his addiction was rage and righteous indignation. All of this was during the Nelson Mandela years and American Civil Rights activism.

She went to college in the United States and stayed there, only visiting home on occasion. When she called her father to get his permission to write their story, he responded, “Write our story. Write whatever you need to. I don’t know what could possibly be worth sharing about my life. But, if it will help one person, tell our story.” And that’s what this book is, written in beautiful prose.

The author tells both her own and her father's story against the backdrop of apartheid and its end in South Africa. She weaves together the three narratives and shows how it is possible to end the cycle of generational trauma to allow true healing within a family. The author does not shy away from difficult topics and there are parts of this book that might be hard for some to read, but it is a story that allows for healing with the telling.

I liked how the author was honest in her telling, even when that honesty might not paint her in the best light. She was able to write in a relatable way, inviting others into her story and cheering her on in her journey.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

Memoir is my favorite genre, but I tend to forget that memoir costs the author something. In the case of It Wasn't Roaring, It Was Weeping, Lisa Jo Baker paid the price of revisiting and then unloading the weight of her own childhood as well as her father’s story. It cost a reckoning with the power history holds over the present.

Beautiful South Africa with its diverse languages and complicated history of racial tension exerts such a huge influence in Baker’s retelling that Zululand’s dusty outback and wide open spaces seem like characters in their own right.

The book began to write itself amid a mother/son conflict in which Baker realized she had inherited more from her dad than his height. Every parent who has struggled with her temper will nod with understanding as Baker grows in her realization that she was carrying forward the sins of her own dad and needed healing herself in order to move forward with grace. Because she submitted to the painful healing process, Lisa Jo Baker’s thoughts on forgiveness are both impactful and hopeful:

“Forgiveness is not an erasing of pain. It is looking the pain in the eyes and honoring it and then releasing it. And it does not require the participation of the perpetrator.”

When “love and grace and forgiveness have balanced out loss and pain and anger,” healing has won and the story finds its long and slow way back to hope.

Many thanks to Convergent Books and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book to facilitate my review, which is, of course, offered freely and with honesty.

Wow! This is a memior that will stick with me. Powerful story telling, vulnerability and healing. I appreciate Lisa-Jo's beautiful prose as she puts you right there with her in her descriptions and details.

“It’s funny how the stories we tell ourselves about the people and places we love are written in glitter pens and decorated with puffy heart stickers, while there are no pages in the scrapbooks of our memories that have the photos of our falls or fears or shame.”

“Our ignorance was deafening. I was a foreigner in my own country, relearning my own history.”

It Wasn’t Roaring, It Was Weeping is a beautiful, lyrical memoir of the contradictions found in our families and histories. Against the backdrop of South Africa and Apartheid, Lisa-Jo tells the story of her father’s legacy and through its telling, demonstrates how we are all shaped by those who have come before us. I found it to be a stunning representation of human nature in all of its glory and faults. In these pages you will read about grief, forgiveness, love, and facing your own ignorance. You might, like I did, marvel at grace.

If you enjoy non-linear timelines, beautiful writing, and somber memoirs, this is for you. For fans of The Glass Castle and All My Knotted-Up Life.

I’m so glad to have read this. Thank you to Netgalley and Convergent Books for the advanced review copy. All opinions are my own.

This book is for anyone who needs to remember that redemption and healing are possible. Baker skillfully and beautifully weaves together her own story marked with pain, with that of the land and the country that she loves. As she excavates her own family story and twisted roots, she looks deeply at issues of ownership, complicity, and forgiveness. I couldn't put this book down, and imagine I'll return to it again for another reading and continue to soak up these truths.

Thank you to Net Galley and Convergent Books for the advanced reader copy of this book.

Thank you to the publisher for the copy - all opinions are my own.

This is a STUNNING book, with utterly captivating writing that travels you all over the world as you follow Lisa-Jo's life and the story of her father's life interwoven with her own. This is a story of heartbreak and healing, grief and love. This is an absolute must for memoir lovers this year. It will leave you transformed.

I regret to say I couldn’t bring myself to finish this one. I don’t know if it’s my mindset right now or the topic but I will be putting this book down for a while. I may finish it at a later date but will not be completing it before the required date. The writing is good, but at 5 chapters in I’m just not motivated to finish it.

This novel has been added to my top books of 2024. It was that good. Lisa-Jo is an immaculate storyteller and I was so deeply invested in this story about family trauma and reconciliation, new experiences, historical injustices and self-discovery all wrapped into a memoir.

Being born white in South Africa during apartheid while dealing with her mother’s death and father’s vitriol was clearly a painful yet eye-opening experience for her. Yet still, the beauty of love, friendship and forgiveness shone brightly.