Darius the Great is Not Okay; Adib Khorram

This book took me a minute to get really immersed into it. I blame that mainly on the start of the story focusing a lot on the High School social politics that Darius is dealing with. I have a hard time connecting to a lot of High School drama as an adult these days. But the voice with which the author uses to portray Darius, how Darius’ depression is always there, but not the loudest thing in the room, how the author portrayed the relationship between Darius and his dad, and how Darius struggles to fit into a heritage he always felt on the periphery from… now THAT really got to me. I probably should have been more mindful of what I was going through emotionally before picking up this book, because the end had me in tears. But that’s a good thing, I promise!

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I loved learning about the Persian culture alongside Darius, who got to really feel connected to his roots for the first time when visiting his grandparents in Iran. All the culturally rich locations and delicious food that Darius got to experience with people who were no longer just pixels on a screen was incredibly touching, but also reinforced why Darius would feel like such an outsider with his own family. Unlike his little sister, he doesn’t speak Farsi, and while his mother warns him that they don’t view depression and having to take medication for it the same as we do in the states (which still isn’t great, given the bullying Darius deals with), Darius wasn’t totally prepared for the “you have nothing to be sad about” mentality that a lot of his extended family approach him with. I resonated with that a lot, to say the least. And while we all need a friend like Sohrab in our lives, the thing about this book that really got to me was the relationships between Darius and his grandparents, and his father.

Darius’s grandfather is dying and it really strengthens the underlying current of sadness around missing out on a history, a life, when it was at its peak. Darius gets just a glimpse of it with the understanding that he is entering his grandfather’s life in its final chapter. Which made the relationship that Darius and his father start to build at the end all the more impactful, at least to me. Darius not only found himself, but got a greater understanding of his family and his father, and how all those elements came together was really beautiful. My only quip about this book is that sometimes the writing structure, with so many one sentence paragraphs, felt like the book was trying to be poetry in a kind of “Clap When You Land” sort of way, but it didn’t really work for me. But other than that, and the slightly slow start, this book was marvelous and automatically gets 5 stars for making me cry.