Everything Sad is Untrue, book review

Everything Sad is Untrue
Daniel Nayeri
Levine Querido, 2020


In Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad is Untrue, winner of the ALA Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults, takes the reader on a wild ride much like the Tornado at the amusement park or like Scheherazade in 1,001 Nights, spinning yarns/memories in order to save his life.

This is not just hyperbole. In the face of trauma, he was unloading, taking heavy burdens off his heart and mind. At the same time he was lightening he was enlightening us, the reader, giving us insight into the life of a refugee. A timely story.

Doing research for my book Cloud of Witnesses for the character Hassan I read many first-hand accounts of life in Iran pre and post the Revolution. Nayeri describes his family, homes, and life in a beautiful and complex country. We are given a picture of a home full of the sound of birds and the smell of jasmine—and at the same time an open sewage trench and running from the morality police. All because of a fateful decision—

Conversion to Christianity.

Again, he is able to break down what this means in a Muslim country. We witness the courage and perseverance of a mother committed to her kids and to God. In the words of her son, she was unstoppable.

There were so many moments while reading his semi-memoir that I had to put it down. The somewhat cavalier way he was forced to abandon his given name for Daniel, something people in Oklahoma would have no trouble pronouncing. One day he was Khosrou and the next his mother was calling him Daniel. I imagined the trauma of being erased. But there were so many of these moments where he would have to subvert his reality to fit other people’s. If they were to get beyond being refugees.

Survival was literally about story and weaving one that will get them somewhere. He apologizes for lying.

I also loved the tangent about the Persian flaw. When someone is weaving a Persia rug they intentionally insert a mistake to let themselves know they are not perfect like God. This seems like such a “human” thing to do—as if we are not capable of making a million mistakes without intention. That’s why they are called mistakes, no one means to do them. And, it seems life is one long string of mishaps. Chaos. Much like living inside a tornado, something Nayeri and his family are introduced to when relocating to Oklahoma.

As if there isn’t enough in this country to confuse and disorientate a newcomer—there are windstorms that will pick you up and fly you through the air. Not a magic carpet ride, but the opposite. Nayeri at school has to put up with the oblivious Jennifers, Kellys, Jareds, and Kyles much like my character Hassan has to do in Cloud of Witnesses. In my novel he at least has a (at first reluctant) friend in Roland, someone who understands what it’s like to be an outsider in middle school society, both boys struggling not to be on the lowest rung of the eighth grade student ladder.

In this book of more than one or two poop stories is a tale of resilience. In the words of the ending paragraph, Nayeri writes the thoughts, hopes, and dreams of anyone new to this country:

I knew we would be whole one day.
Maybe it would take a thousand years.
But we’d get there, little by little.