Beautiful debut with a lot of necessary conversations

filled star filled star filled star filled star filled star
henderkd Avatar

By

Darius the Great is Not Okay starts with Darius being bullied and looked down on while he is in America. A family emergency requires him to travel to Iran for the first time. I loved Darius. I related to him a lot. He's fat, he has depression, his relationship with his family isn't great, and he feels displaced. I was surprised at how much I related to Darius. None of the conversations he has with other people felt forced or out of place. I loved Sohrab too. He's a boy Darius befriends in Iran, but the book alludes to them being more than that. Maybe it's because I had a friendship like Sohrab, but everything about their friendship and the struggles they faced felt natural.



This story is about family and appreciating your roots. Darius feels so distant from his Persian identity, but Sohrab helps him to embrace these things. There are also conversations about grief and illness in different ways. The way we see Darius and his dad navigate their mental illnesses while in Iran was handled very well. There seems to be some distaste towards medication throughout this book. That might make some people uncomfortable, so I wanted to point it out.