Everything Sad Is Untrue, by Daniel Nayeri

This is probably the strangest and best memoir that I’ve ever read. Daniel writes from the perspective of his twelve-year-old self, trying to explain who he is and where he came from to a classroom of slightly hostile and uninterested American kids—and to you, his reader. Early on he tells his reader, “If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.”

Knowing one another and breaking down the barrier between strangers is a theme that threads through the rest of the book. Daniel, whose real name is Khousrou, is not just any twelve-year-old, he’s a refugee from Iran. And in post-9/11 America, there are a lot of barriers to break down for a kid from Iran. 

But the story Khousrou tells isn’t just an account of one family’s journey from wealth in Iran to poverty in the USA; it’s a meditation on the things that divide us, the nature of God, and tracing where strength and hope come from in the middle of suffering. I don’t want to go into a great deal of detail lest I ruin his storytelling which somehow manages to be both poignant, eloquent and very much in the spirit of a twelve-year-old boy!