Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri is, on one level, a story about a boy who came to America as a refugee from Iran. Besides encountering a different language, different ways of doing things, even different kinds of toilets, Daniel has to deal with losses.

First he lost his name, Khosrou, because no one could pronounce it. He lost the presence of his father, who stayed behind in Iran. He lost his language and culture. He lost his position in society: his mother had been a doctor in Iran but worked cutting cardboard in a company that made business cards in the US. And he lost his connection with his extended family, his memories of them in fragments. “A patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee” is something he says often.

That was when I realized I had to write down the memories and myths and the legends—and even the phrases and jokes. Or I’d lose everything. Maybe even the recipes (p. 235, Kindle version).

Another layer of the story is the sad human tendency not only not to welcome anyone “different,” but to actively persecute them.

Yet another major facet is Daniel’s mother’s conversion to Christianity and the fatwa that was placed on her head, which led to her fleeing Iran with her two children. They ended up in a refugee camp in Italy for three years before finally making it to the US.

Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you (p. 195).

How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise (p. 196).

If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane (pp. 196-197).

Daniel tells his story from his viewpoint as a twelve-year-old boy in the style of Scheherazade, the storyteller in One Thousand and One Nights. Sometimes he addresses the reader directly. Sometimes he addresses his teacher as if what he is writing is for an assignment.

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 (p. 1).

The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love. All the good stuff is between and around the things that happen (p. 299).

Being a Persian/Eastern tale, it isn’t told in a way we’re used to.

Mrs. Miller says I have “lost the plot,” and am now just making lists of things that happened to fill space. But I replied that she is beholden to a Western mode of storytelling that I do not accept and that the 1,001 Nights are basically Scheherazade stalling for time, so I don’t see the difference. She laughed when I said this (p. 299).

I had heard marvelous things about the book, but was confused when I started reading it. It jumps from a scene at school to a story about Daniel’s ancestors to a story about his mother or something that happened on their journey here. At first I thought this was because the narrator is a twelve-year-old boy. Then I realized it was a different style. I don’t often do this with fiction, but when I finished the book, I immediately started rereading it. I understood it much better the second time–I felt I had all the pieces, so I wasn’t confused. Plus, I just wasn’t ready to let go of the book yet.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the cover until another reviewer mentioned the tornado (which is in the book) is swirling around various things Nayeri mentions throughout his story. Plus, his style of storytelling is cyclical, like the tornado. That helped things click into place for me, plus it made me think the cover designer was a genius.

The title of the book comes from a scene in The Lord of the Rings when Samwise Gamgee “sees Gandalf come back and it’s like seeing his grandpa return from the land of death and memories.” “And Sam thinks maybe all the sad parts of the adventure will come untrue, now that this one has. And the beautiful part is that they do” (p. 232).

Though the story stops at a sad place, it seems a turning point towards hope.

Daniel makes his mother the heroine of story, the one who always had hope, who was unstoppable. “What you believe about the future will change how you live in the present” (p. 347).

The legend of my mom is that she can’t be stopped. Not when you hit her. Not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage. Not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little-by-little poison of sadness. And the legend is true. I think because she’s fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood, to a beautiful place on the other side (p. 213).

Once I got into the book, I totally loved it. Well—almost totally. There were a lot of poop stories—maybe because the narrator is a twelve-year-old boy. But there were such poignant moments as well as many funny ones. I couldn’t help but admire and connect with Daniel’s mother. But my eyes were also opened to what refugees experience and to Persian culture.

Some of my other favorite quotes from the book:

I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don’t know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don’t know what anybody wants from me. But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend (p. 2).

To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose (p. 51).

The lesson here is that people have scales in their heads and they measure other people for their value and ugly refugee boys are near the bottom and pretty blond girls are at the top. This is not a happy lesson. But you either get the truth, or you get good news—you don’t often get both (p. 80).

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for . . . making something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy (p. 122).

My mom comes home exhausted every night. I have never seen her not exhausted. And also, I have never seen her not working (p. 154).

Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love (p. 217).

I found this video of the author and his mother making cream puffs, which I thought was really sweet. I had almost finished my second reading of the book when I saw this, and it was neat to actually see Daniel and his mother

I loved what Kathryn Butler said in her review of this book: “He weaves fragments of myth and personal history into his story, with threads intricately looping like the magnificent Persian rugs he describes (some of them studded with jewels, as can also be said of his prose).”

I’m sure this will be one of my favorite books of the year . . . and of all time.