Books › Everything Sad Is Untrue
Everything Sad Is Untrue
368 pages
A sprawling tapestry of memory that weaves middle-school awkwardness with ancient Persian myth to keep the darkness at bay.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting cross-legged on a rug while a master storyteller spins a web of memory, myth, and middle-school awkwardness. The narrative pace is intentionally meandering, looping back on itself like a Scheherazade tale to delay the painful parts and savor the beautiful ones. It balances a deeply poignant, bittersweet mood with flashes of wry humor that ground the sweeping Persian legends in the reality of an Oklahoma classroom. The prose is a marvel, lyrical and poetic one moment, disarmingly conversational the next. It is a perfect match for readers who love genre-defying memoirs and oral storytelling traditions, offering an emotional journey that transforms profound displacement into a triumphant, mythic reclamation of self.
- Mood
- nostalgic
- bittersweet
- intimate
- wondrous
- Tone
- earnest
- humorous
- poignant
- conversational
- mythic
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- power of storytelling · memory and truth · cultural displacement · resilience · family mythology
- The writing
- Lyrical yet conversational, seamlessly blending middle-school humor with sweeping, poetic Persian mythology.
- The arc
- Moves from a sense of desperate, isolated storytelling to a profound, bittersweet reclamation of history and identity.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate genre-defying memoirs, oral storytelling traditions, and narratives that balance deep sorrow with irrepressible humor.
Content notes
- refugee trauma
- bullying
- racism
- domestic abuse
- threat of violence
About the book
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 fields near the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers bled red like the yolk of sunset burst over everything, and further back still to the jasmine-scented city of Isfahan.
Description from Open Library.
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