Everything Sad is Untrue: (a true story). Audiobook

 

Rating: 4 out of 5 | a coming of age story that we have not yet heard

My Thoughts:

Plot/Theme--

This coming of age story, read by the author, is an interesting look into what it is like to grow up as an Iranian immigrant in middle America, specifically in Oklahoma. Khosrou, called Daniel by the white people, is a middle schooler in Oklahoma. His stories, long winded and tumbling like the tornadoes of Oklahoma, are likened to the kinds of stories Sheherazade must have told in One Thousand and One Nights. In other words, these stories  sound fantastically horrible and fictional, and yet I think they are told by 12-year old Daniel, as a way to live another day in this hostile classroom.

He uses the middle school strategy of talking about gross things like poop and blood, but in a way that is poetic and heartbreaking. . . because yes, we know that this is true. When Khosrou continues to emphasize why his mother is unstoppable, as well as how his father is immovable, it is heartbreaking. 

Recommendation --

As this child's culture is not familiar to me, and probably to most middle schoolers in Hawai'i, the audiobook, either as a read along or standalone, is the best introduction to this "window" memoir. Readers need to hear the patois of the author and how he pronounces those names and words that are not foreign to him, but foreign to our eyes and ears. That is the best way to respect his story. 

From the Publisher:

At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much. But Khosrou's stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the
moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, back to the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy...and further back to the fieldsnear the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers
bled red like the yolk of the sunset had burst over everything, and further back still to the jasmine-scented city of Isfahan. Like Scheherazade in a hostile classroom, Daniel weaves a tale to save his own life: to stake his claim to the truth. And it is (a true story).

Publication Information:

• Author/Narrator: Daniel Nayeri
• Publisher: Listening Library
• Release Date: August 25, 2020