In a few days before Darius and his family must leave Iran, Darius decides to buy Sohrab a pair of cleats as a gift. He visits the house to find their family in grief. Sohrab lashes out at Darius before revealing his father has just died (who was previously revealed to be jailed by the Iranian government for unknown reasons). Sohrab complains that Darius is always crying but has nothing to be sad for, and tells him to leave. Darius runs to the rooftop and cries. Since Laleh was in charge of feeding the fish, she had also taken upon herself the solemn duty of naming them. She was talking to Laleh in rapid-fire Farsi, something about school, I thought, because Laleh kept switching from Farsi to English for words like cafeteriaand Heads-Down, Thumbs-Up.

Darius the Great Is Not Okay (Darius the Great, 1) : Khorram

Penn, Farrah (December 11, 2019). "The 24 Best YA Books Of 2018". BuzzFeed . Retrieved January 1, 2022. This is where I fell in love with Yazd, with Persepolis, with Persian food and culture. We need diverse books because they help us discover a world that is more than just our own four walls. We need diverse books because they teach us tolerance, acceptance and love. I needed this book, because I had never before read a story set in Iran. I never knew that I wanted to taste Quottab, a deep-fried, almond-filled pastry, or Faludeh, a sorbet-like dessert served with rose water syrup. I want to go visit Yazd, I want to see Persepolis and learn about the historic Darius the Great. I loved how elegantly the author teaches the reader about Persian culture and life in Iran. rep :: fat biracial Persian (Iranian, white) gay MC with depression, major Persian (Iranian) Baha’i side character, major side character with depression, multiple Persian (Iranian) side charactersWhat I'm trying to say, in short, is that I was primed to like this book. I'd heard about it months ago, when the author was awarded a six-figure advance by Dial, and when my girlfriend managed to get her hands on a galley*, I dove into it almost right away. A love letter to anyone who has felt uncomfortable in their own skin and wondered where exactly they belonged. A big-hearted and marvelous debut.” How did you go about building the relationships in your book, particularly the friendship between Darius and Sohrab? Why did you choose to write about Darius’s feelings towards Sohrab in the way that you did? Sohrab is really Darius’ first friend, since he never really fit in at school and always got bullied, and he helps Darius realize that who he is is okay, that the different parts of himself aren’t bad or things to be insulted. And it was just so beautiful to see these two soft boys BE SO SUPPORTIVE of each other and I loved it. Not to harp on the possible-autism thing, but Darius is more or less this non-verbal throughout the novel, again making one wonder...

Darius the Great Is Not Okay | LitCharts Family Theme in Darius the Great Is Not Okay | LitCharts

While it didn’t capture my experience exactly, it did highlight just exactly how depression can turn you against yourself without you realizing it, and how it’s okay to not be okay. One of my favorite things about the rep is that it shows the “subtlety” (if you could call it that) of depression. Sometimes it’s not a huge thing looming over you; sometimes it’s just a collection of moments that build up until you can’t take it anymore. One thing I did deliberately try to include, though, was a different version of masculine affection. Cultures in Southwest Asia have different rules for expressing platonic affection physically, and I wanted to capture that — as well as Darius’s confusion on experiencing it for the first time, and trying to reconcile it with his own feelings about how boys can or should relate to each other. The next day, Sohrab joins Darius’s family on their trip to the ruins of Persepolis. There, Darius sees carvings of his namesake, Darioush the Great—but he doesn’t feel great and brave like Darioush. Babou drives, but on the way home, he gets angry and pulls over. Dad finishes the drive and Sohrab whispers to Darius what happened: Babou got lost. He won’t be able to drive again after this. As a child of immigrants who hasn’t seen her grandparents in ten years, I was deeply moved by Darius’s story. What is one thing you’d like children of immigrants to know as they grow older and face the world? So our Haft-Seen was loaded with everything tradition allowed, plus a framed photo of Dad in the corner. Laleh insisted we had to add it, because Stephenbegins with the sound of S.The first third of the book is spent establishing Darius' social ineptitude, and of course, his Persianness. And here enters one of the author's greatest failings in this novel: it's as though instead of building a convincing, three-dimensional character by perfecting a voice and ascribing to that character compelling idiosyncrasies, and establishing the character's nuanced worldview, Khorram has seen fit to simply make the character Persian. I got super attached to all the characters! There's nothing like ten other side characters. Every character is my family now. The good, the bad and the damn fathers. Father issues. Lots of it here. It was like a garbled transmission from a starship in distress. “Maman,” Mom said, “Darius and Stephen want to say hello.” Mamanis another Farsi word that means both a person and a relationship—in this case, mother. But it could also mean grandmother, even though technically that would be mamanbozorg. One of the things I loved most about this book was the depression representation, which was… absolutely amazing. Granted, I haven’t seen a LOT of depression rep in books, but this is definitely one of the best representations I’ve read.

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Darius is a well-crafted, awkward but endearing character, and his cross-cultural story will inspire reflection about identity and belonging. A strong choice for YA shelves. Give this to fans of Adam Silvera and John Corey Whaley.” Darius spends so much time thinking about whether certain utterances or actions of those around him are "Social Cues" (capitalization sic), that the reader occasionally wonders whether or not Darius is on the Spectrum, but there's no definitive evidence one way or the other. (Likely, it's simply a failure of Khorram's to develop Darius' voice: in general, one of the things that irked me about the book is the way Khoram totally failed to nail the voice of the contemporary American teenager. Darius is supposed to be about 14 or 15, but he often comes off sounding about three or four years younger).Khoobam, merci,” Laleh said, and before I knew it, she had launched into her third retelling of her latest game of Heads-Down, Thumbs-Up. This is an incredible story of friendship, family, and identity that you absolutely won’t regret reading.” But it was hard. It didn’t feel like she was half a world away, it felt like she was half a universe away—like she was coming to me from some alternate reality. Dad and I knelt on the floor to squeeze our faces into the camera shot, while Laleh sat on Mom’s lap in her rolling office chair. Darius Kellner is what he likes to call a Fractional Persian as his mother was born and raised in Iran but his dad is white. Although he has a nightly ritual of watching Star Trek reruns with his father, the rest of the time Darius feels like he is a big disappointment to his dad. The family makes a trip to Iran to visit relatives and there Darius meets Sohrab, the teenage neighbor of his grandparents. This is a YA story of feeling like you don't belong and learning to accept who you are.

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Most Haft-Seens have vinegar and sumac and sprouts and apples and pudding and dried olives and garlic on them—all things that start with the sound of Sin Farsi. Some people add other things that don’t begin with Sto theirs too: symbols of renewal and prosperity, like mirrors and bowls of coins. And some families—like ours—have goldfish too. Mom said it had something to do with the zodiac and Pisces, but then she admitted that if it weren’t for Laleh, who loved taking care of the goldfish, she wouldn’t include them at all. But Darius is and always has been about all kinds of non-romantic love. It was important to me to show that the love between friends can change your world every bit as much as romantic love can.Darius's dad finds him. They open up emotionally to each other: Stephen tells him of how he was close to suicide when Darius was young, and went on pills to prevent it. He states, "Suicide isn't the only way you can lose someone to depression." Darius explains why he was upset about Star Trek, and how he feels that Stephen thinks Darius was disappointment to him. Stephen reassures him that he loves him.