"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."