I knew very little about life in Iran before reading this book-and, in spite of Khorram’s excellent exposition, I won’t pretend to know much more now-yet I had such a good time watching Darius navigate the differences between his two cultures. Khorram is just so good at bringing Darius’s thoughts to life through the page. Yet Darius the Great Is Not Okay perfectly belies the idea that you need to be like a protagonist in order to sympathize with them.

But in Iran he meets Sohrab, a boy his age, and everything changes.Īs I said in my introduction, Darius and I are worlds apart (I also don’t struggle with depression). So when his family announces their first trip to Iran in Darius’s lifetime, he’s filled with trepidation. Meanwhile, Darius feels awkwardly out of touch with his mom’s Persian heritage: he doesn’t speak Farsi, unlike his kid sister, Laleh. He is bullied at school (and outside of school), and even though he and his dad watch Star Trek every night together and are both taking medication for depression, there seems to be an emotional gulf between them. Darius is half-Persian and male and a teenager and fat I’m a 32-year-old thin, white woman, yet Adib Khorram bridged that gap through incorrigibly nerdy narration and I am here for it.ĭarius is, as the title suggests, very much not OK. But then it had to go and introduce frequent, detailed allusions to Star Trek: The Next Generation, complete with Darius declaring that Captain Picard is the best captain, and … reader, at that point, I would have hid a dead body for this book. This book had me at its opening scene, set in a tea store, where Darius talks to us for the first of many times about his love for properly steeped looseleaf teas.

Darius is not okay