Kate Christensen writes: "Scrima paints vivid, detailed memories of places to evoke a web of intimate relationships that emerges gradually from a temporal fog into shocking, unforgettable clarity", while Robert Goolrick calls A Lesser Day "a monument to the human struggle to survive, to remember, to understand, and to love".

The German translation, titled Wie viele Tage,[11] was published by Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz, Austria in 2018 to great acclaim, with Bettina Schulte of the Badische Zeitung[12] noting its "uncanny precision of perception" and Claudia Fuchs of SWR2[13] its "remarkable freedom of thought and agency".

In her mind, she need only open a drawer in the old kitchen cabinet on Staten Island or imagine the Italian language primers from school or remember how, 'in this vast empire of our childhood,’ she invented 'scientific facts' about the universe for her brother, and already the figures are set into motion (...) This is a high art, and it testifies to the richness of a book that succeeds in freeing itself from any concerns of self-assertion to create a space in which the reader indeed begins to think more precisely, see more clearly—and become more receptive and sentient."

Scrima received a literature grant from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts in 2004;[15] she won a Hackney Literary Award[16] for her short story Sisters[17] and took part in residencies at Ledig House, New York;[18] and Schloss Salem,[19] Germany.

In 2021, Literaturverlag Droschl published the German edition of Scrima’s second novel, Like Lips, Like Skins, under the title Kreisläufe, a word that carries multiple meanings including cycles, circuits, circulations, which are themes in this novel about family trauma.

The delicate transitions between grammatical forms of past and present, for instance, which slip by unnoticed as one moves through time and space.”[28] Kreisläufe was also reviewed in the magazines Hotlist[29] and literaturblatt[30] and the blogs Gute Literatur—Meine Empfehlung[31] and Literaturleuchtet.

In 2021/22, Andrea Scrima collaborated with the artist Anike Joyce Sadiq on a joint piece on institutional criticism in the form of a conversation titled "Against the Erasure of Dissent," published in the German original by Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and presented at the Villa Romana in the context of the conference series "Manifestiamo."