Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

I read this book because it was on Obama's list of recommended reading, and I find that his choices are almost always both enjoyable and memorable, and about 1/2 of them are books I wouldn't have noticed if it wasn't for him, so I am grateful that he is still doing them. The author had a fairly traumatic upbringing, with her mother leaving she and her sister when they were small, really never (to this point) having a meaningful parental role in their lives, and then her father died when she was thirteen. An orphan and not an orphan on many levels. Then she is also a woman without homeland. Her mother is American, but from an Armenian family that has that identity, her father is from Ghana, and her parents were international workers, so she grew up in Italy, England, Uganda, and Tanzania. She speaks English, Italian, French, and Swahili, but not the first language of either of her parents. In addition to being an exploration of who she is it is also at core an exploration of who her father was. She begins to see her father as mortal, both wonderful and flawed. Moving away from her worship of a fixed, singular ideal, she discovers love in a plurality of places. She pays homage to he surrogate mothers, her aunts and half-siblings, and her ancestors. She also finds slices of herself in every place she has lived, and that in the end, she is going to be okay.